Funmurphys: the Blog

A Cosmic Back Of the Envelope Calculation

Scientists and engineers love equations. Not only do they make the modern world possible, they can be a lot of fun at parties. At least the kind scientists and engineers throw. And we (I'm just a country engineer) all love a good back of the envelope calculation, which is how one turns a WAG (Wild Assed Guess) into a SWAG (Scientific Wild Assed Guess). So I have to applaud Prof Andrew Watson for this Cosmic SWAG of a calculation:

Is there anybody out there? Probably not, according to a scientist from the University of East Anglia. A mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of Earth.

Structurally complex and intelligent life evolved late on Earth and it has already been suggested that this process might be governed by a small number of very difficult evolutionary steps.

Prof Watson, from the School of Environmental Sciences, takes this idea further by looking at the probability of each of these critical steps occurring in relation to the life span of Earth, giving an improved mathematical model for the evolution of intelligent life.

....

His model, published in the journal Astrobiology, suggests an upper limit for the probability of each step occurring is 10 per cent or less, so the chances of intelligent life emerging is low - less than 0.01 per cent over four billion years.

I bet that makes him a big hit at all the parties, especially with the Panspermia-ists, who were a pretty lively bunch to begin with.

The Other Metabolic Clock

Or we've all got rhythm in our bones, even if it was discovered in our teeth.
Dr. Timothy Bromage discovered a pattern to growth rings in human teeth, and then in our bones as well. Then he discovered them in other organisms, including that lab favorite, the rat:

The newly discovered rhythm, like the circadian rhythm, originates in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that functions as the main control center for the autonomic nervous system. But unlike the circadian rhythm, this clock varies from one organism to another, operating on shorter time intervals for small mammals, and longer ones for larger animals. For example, rats have a one-day interval, chimpanzees six, and humans eight.

The article links short intervals to small size and short life:

Reporting his findings today in the "Late-breaking News" session during the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research, Bromage said, "The same biological rhythm that controls incremental tooth and bone growth also affects bone and body size and many metabolic processes, including heart and respiration rates. In fact, the rhythm affects an organism's overall pace of life, and its life span. So, a rat that grows teeth and bone in one-eighth the time of a human also lives faster and dies younger."

Humans have by far the most variation in these long-term incremental growth rhythms, with some humans clocking as few as five days, and others as many as ten. Correspondingly, humans have the most variability in body size among mammals.

I assume you have the exact same question I do - namely, do human also have the most variability in life span among mamals as well? Should I be happy that my son, who just turned 14, still has some baby teeth left? Maybe people who live fast and die young are just metabolically programmed that way. Will life insurance companies request a tooth so they can set their rates appropriately? Maybe you should look a gift horse in the mouth.

Who Says Adventure is a Thing of the Past?

Have you ever desired to pit yourself against nature and see who comes out on top? Have you ever wanted to go off into the wild blue and bring back enlightenment? Have you ever seen a gladiator movie? OK, I have a deal for you - join a Russian Arctic drift expedition and spend 7 months drifting around on a piece of ice. You can follow the path blazed by Jürgen Graeser, the first German to take part in a Russian expedition. But floating around on a slab of ice and sending a weather balloon up every day wasn't all fun and games (unlike playing peek-abo with Polar Bears):

In spite of its importance for the global climate system, the Arctic is still a blank on the data map. Up to now, continuous measuring in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean is missing. „We are not able to develop any reliable climate scenarios without disposing of data series with high temporal and local resolutions about the Arctic winter. The data which Jürgen Graeser has obtained in the course of the NP 35 expedition are unique, and they are apt to considerably diminish the still existing uncertainties in our climate models" said Prof. Dr. Klaus Dethloff, project leader at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

I have to applaud Jürgen Graeser's dedication to science. Adventure and learning in one package - what a deal. Who says adventure is a thing of the past?

Funny Bone Meets Thinking Cap

Hot off the press, get it while it lasts -- the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded:

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its
Side Effects." You can see one of the authors do his Sword Swallowing

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled - and the allied topic of draping.

BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night. No link to her classic lecture
"A Bed Ecosystem," but you can look it up in the lecture abstracts of the 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36. However, if you value a good nights sleep as I do, I recommend against actually reading her work.

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung. I just wonder why they thought to look for vanillin there in the first place. Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards. No word if this effect has been replicated in mice, which make a better analog for humans.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order. Hey, Microsoft can't properly order numbers, so we have no hope of handling "The" properly. A maybe, An probably, but not The.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. I'm outraged they didn't include a citation for the fact that this groundbreaking work also examined the desirability of a chemical weapon that created "severe and lasting halitosis" - or that it dates back to at least 1994.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup. If you're interesting in losing weight, try his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Professor Wansink is also a Stanford grad.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters. So next time you take your hamster on a long flight, don't forget the Viagra.

The Skinny On the Skinny Gene

The good news is that yes indeed there is a gene that can keep you skinny. The bad news is that a therapy utilizing it is 10 years away.

Khosrow Adeli, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Toronto and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, who studies obesity, called the most recent finding an important one.

"Many of the genes we have found so far appear to promote obesity," he said. "This one appears to basically control it."

However, multiple factors are involved in obesity, including metabolism, fat cells, liver, and most recently, the brain, Prof. Adeli said.

"We certainly are going to see more of these similar discoveries to fully understand all of the factors involved," he said, adding that it's more difficult to design drugs that increase, rather than inhibit, something.

"If one can devise a way to increase activity of this adipose [gene], then it can certainly be very helpful in treating cases of obesity."

Until then, I'll be eating whole grain barley for breakfast.

Hey, I'm not overweight, I just don't provide enough stimulation for my adipose gene.

Why Do Research?

How's this for a provocative title: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

The article is relatively short and readable, and makes me wonder why I haven't heard about it before -- I guess because it isn't in scientists or journalists interest for the public to know this. Here's something to ponder as you read the lastest research finding:

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive “positive” results. “Negative” results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a “positive” association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics.

There is science, and then there is science - like the time my mother claimed a study showed the worst weather was on Saturdays and the best was on Tuesdays. Does such a study have any meaning - the weekly cycle is a human invention that has no basis in meterology, but statistically you can pick out a "best" and "worst" based some definition of weather quality (rain, snow, departure from mean temperature, or whatever).

But even within real science, there is research and then there is research. Number one would be studies that are just too small to pick out the effect they are looking for. When examining probabilistic effects, sample size matters. How much does smoking increase heart disease? It's not a simple smoke and get heart disease, or not smoke and don't. It's normally 50% of non-smokers get heart disease, and 75% of smokers do (in made up numbers). Teasing that kind of information out of an assemblage of non-identical people requires lots of people. I'd be willing to bet most health studies simply lack enough participants out of the gate to be reliable. Yet they still happen, the results are still reported breathlessly, and some other equally unreliable study will be equally breathlessly reported when it contradicts the first - or worse, the study that comports with accepted ideas will be given far more play than the one that doesn't.

Common sense has a part in science:

Finally, instead of chasing statistical significance, we should improve our understanding of the range of R values—the pre-study odds—where research efforts operate [10]. Before running an experiment, investigators should consider what they believe the chances are that they are testing a true rather than a non-true relationship. Speculated high R values may sometimes then be ascertained. As described above, whenever ethically acceptable, large studies with minimal bias should be performed on research findings that are considered relatively established, to see how often they are indeed confirmed. I suspect several established “classics” will fail the test.

I suppose this is one of the things turn of the century physicist types disliked about quantum mechanics - probabilistic vs. deterministic results. The great thing about all the classic phyiscs experiments is that they are deterministic -- the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant that can be measured; either there is an ether or there isn't (as Michelson and Morley proved), the charge on an electron is constant and can be measured exactly (for which Robert Milikan won the nobel.) But I digress.

There have been a couple of recent responses to Dr. Ioannidis. First is
Most Published Research Findings Are False—But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way:

In a recent article in PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis quantified the theoretical basis for lack of replication by deriving the positive predictive value (PPV) of the truth of a research finding on the basis of a combination of factors. He showed elegantly that most claimed research findings are false [6]. One of his findings was that the more scientific teams involved in studying the subject, the less likely the research findings from individual studies are to be true. The rapid early succession of contradictory conclusions is called the “Proteus phenomenon” [7]. For several independent studies of equal power, Ioannidis showed that the probability of a research finding being true when one or more studies find statistically significant results declines with increasing number of studies.

As part of the scientific enterprise, we know that replication—the performance of another study statistically confirming the same hypothesis—is the cornerstone of science and replication of findings is very important before any causal inference can be drawn. While the importance of replication is also acknowledged by Ioannidis, he does not show how PPVs of research findings increase when more studies have statistically significant results. In this essay, we demonstrate the value of replication by extending Ioannidis' analyses to calculation of the PPV when multiple studies show statistically significant results.

The other response is When Should Potentially False Research Findings Be Considered Acceptable?:

As society pours more resources into medical research, it will increasingly realize that the research “payback” always represents a mixture of false and true findings. This tradeoff is similar to the tradeoff seen with other societal investments—for example, economic development can lead to environmental harms while measures to increase national security can erode civil liberties. In most of the enterprises that define modern society, we are willing to accept these tradeoffs. In other words, there is a threshold (or likelihood) at which a particular policy becomes socially acceptable.

In the case of medical research, we can similarly try to define a threshold by asking: “When should potentially false research findings become acceptable to society?” In other words, at what probability are research findings determined to be sufficiently true and when should we be willing to accept the results of this research?

The conclusion:

In the final analysis, the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper, “When should potentially false research findings be considered acceptable?” has much to do with our beliefs about what constitutes knowledge itself [24]. The answer depends on the question of how much we are willing to tolerate the research results being wrong. Equation 3 shows an important result: if we are not willing to accept any possibility that our decision to accept a research finding could be wrong (r = 0), that would mean that we can operate only at absolute certainty in the “truth” of a research hypothesis (i.e., PPV = 100%). This is clearly not an attainable goal [1]. Therefore, our acceptability of “truth” depends on how much we care about being wrong. In our attempts to balance these tradeoffs, the value that we place on benefits, harms, and degrees of errors that we can tolerate becomes crucial.
...
We conclude that since obtaining the absolute “truth” in research is impossible, society has to decide when less-than-perfect results may become acceptable. The approach presented here, advocating that the research hypothesis should be accepted when it is coherent with beliefs “upon which a man is prepared to act” [27], may facilitate decision making in scientific research.

So why do research? Because you will have less imperfect information on which to act.

Not All Science Is As Fun And Pointless

If you're like me, you hear "like nailing jello to a wall" and you immediately translate the phrase to "impossible." Fortunately, not everybody thinks that way, as this scientifically inclined person demonstrates. The man (while I don't know the person's gender, I'm assuming only a man spends so much time on a project like this) chronicles his attempts to nail jello to a wall, starting with the expected tragedies but culminating in triumph.

He then attempts to nail jello to a wall while the jello is vertical! Did he succeed? You'll have to check the extended entry to find out:

Keeping The Immune System On The Right Track

How's this for a mystery: You have more bacteria living in your small intestine than cells in your body, and your immune system does nothing:

For years, scientists have wondered whether the same mechanism is at work in tissues that come in regular contact with bacteria and other microbial organisms. The small intestine, for example, which absorbs essential nutrients from food and drink and protects the body from invasive microbes, is literally teeming with bacteria, which help break down waste. The presence of so many bacteria is a potential trigger for an immune system response. Why do T cells almost always ignore the small intestine, leaving this vital tissue unharmed

Normally, dendridic cells by displaying antigens teach the immune system what not to attack. But not in the small intestine. Instead, stromal cells in the lymph node do it. Why should you care? Scientist wonder if this method to keep healthy tissue from being attacked by the immune system can't be used in autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Lawyers: Another Hazard of Research

Here's another entry in why I think our current judicial system sucks: Fast-multiplying lawsuits can stymie medical science. Actually, I was surprised by one reason why:

The lead author, Brad A. Racette, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, writes from personal experience: His studies tentatively linking welding to increased risk of Parkinson's disease resulted in a torrent of subpoenas for research data. Responding to them slows or stops his follow-up research.

"Participation in the legal system can be a huge burden on a researcher's schedule," Racette says. "There comes a point where a scientist needs the right to be able to say, testifying in court is not what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm supposed to be studying disease."

And the authors are grown up to realize conflicts of interest cut both ways (i.e. both plaintiffs and defendants):

The authors note that the substantial financial interests at stake in lawsuits often leads to biased research by well-paid expert witnesses. They cite the example of a Texas doctor found to be overdiagnosing a disease known as silicosis. The doctor had a financial interest in the number of patients diagnosed.

Peer review is of course a part of the regular scientific process, Racette notes, but a knowledgeable expert can design a study with a predetermined goal of discrediting earlier studies that linked a suspected toxin to a disease.

Industries on the defensive have also attempted to impugn the credibility of researchers. As an example, the authors cite the case of Herbert Needleman, M.D., professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh and the first scientist to link lead exposure to low IQ levels in children. The lead industry attacked Needleman's integrity, alleging academic fraud and triggering investigations by the Federal Scientific Integrity Board and his university. The investigations failed to find any evidence of academic fraud, and Needleman's results were later replicated, leading to beneficial changes such as the removal of lead from gasoline.

Full Disclosure: While I haven't met them, both authors are on staff at St. Louis Children's Hospital where my daughter has had two visits and of which I have the highest opinion.

Stupid Headline

Here's a stupid headline:

Is that a surprise? Would we ever read "Mental Health Risks Vary Within the U.S. White Population"?, or "Mental Health Risks Vary Within the U.S. Population"? Are black people some sort of homogeneous entity where no variation is expected?

This was another shocking line from the report: "He believes clinicians need to look beyond crude categories of race in order to learn more about the backgrounds of their clients in order to better treat them." That's your tax dollars at work, funding Captain Obvious.

Forest Management

My backyard would appear to have a remnant of the primeval Missouri Forest: Oak, Ash, Hickory, and Dogwood. The previous owner had marked several trees for removal by putting a big red paint blotch on them. I have removed a trio of live trees (oddly enough none had a big red splotch) and a bunch of dead trees - two white pines and the remainder dogwoods. I didn't try to change the variety, however, but had other concerns. But in the larger forest outside my backyard, Oaks and Hickories are on the decline. Researchers at Case Western University surmise that fires caused by lightning help the Oaks compete against more shade tolerant trees:

Paul Drewa, assistant professor in Case's biology department, and graduate student Sheryl Petersen, suspect that these kinds of fires may provide a natural mechanism to deter encroachment of shade tolerant hardwoods, especially red maples that are crowding out oaks and other plants on the ground floors of numerous forests throughout the eastern United States.

...

"Human alterations to the natural fire regime, especially decades of fire suppression, have changed oak-dominated ecosystems in southern Ohio and throughout the eastern US," reported Petersen. "As a result, there is a preponderance of shade tolerant hardwoods that are preventing oaks and other native species from regenerating."

The oak canopies of remaining forest fragments are deceptive, according to the researchers, who found that oaks are not thriving well beyond the seedling stage, with few developing into older life history stages, including juveniles, saplings, and poles.

"Eventually this means the demise of oak trees and other less shade tolerant plant species in future years," said Drewa

This isn't any new idea though -- as a 2004 article in Missouri Conservationist Magazine makes clear:

In the fall, the hills adjacent to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers seem ablaze with brilliant orange sugar maples. Few trees are as attractive as a sugar maple in autumn, but there is something haunting in all that orange.

Not long ago, these same hills contained a lot more of the reds, purples and yellows of oak and hickory. Slowly but surely, the oranges are taking over, indicating that the river hill forests are changing, and not for the better.

We have long had some sugar maple in our woods. In the last 50 years, however, the amount of sugar maple has increased dramatically. This is especially true in counties adjacent to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, where land is especially productive because of loess, or wind blown silt. Loess is blown from the river bottoms and deposited on nearby slopes. In some areas, loess is more than 100 feet deep. In areas like these, sugar maples are overtaking most other forest vegetation.

The primary reason for the maple takeover is that over the last 50 or so years, we have stopped fires from burning our woods. Native Americans commonly used fire as a tool in Missouri. They burned the landscape to aid in hunting and fighting wars. They also used fire to improve wildlife habitat, which helped ensure an abundance of game. The first European settlers also used fire, primarily to create and improve pasture lands.

Fire played a huge role in shaping the composition of our woods. Oaks and hickories are relatively tolerant of fire. Their thick bark helps protect them from intense heat. Smaller seedlings and trees may be "top-killed," but their deep root crown allows them to resprout quickly and vigorously.

Fighting forest fires is done with the best of intentions, but not always smartly (just like the new model, prescribed burns). The problem with the old zero tolerance policy is that it allows fuel to build up and huge conflagrations to occur. And if it weren't for the obvious fact that the longer we fought forest fires, the worse they got, we would still have a zero tolerance policy.

The problem is how to transition back to way forests were prior to zero tolerance without burning the forests down in the process. And another thing to consider is that prior to zero tolerance, the policy was not just let natural fires burn, but set our own. For millenia, the Indians set fires across North America. So to get back to what we consider virgin forest, we have to realize that in fact there has been nothing virgin about North American forests for millenia. What we really want is to go back to actively managed forests with fire as the primary tool.

Prescribed burns seem to be the favored way for the Forest Service to manage forest fires and an immediate return to older practices, but as Mike at SOS forest points out:

So the New Plan is to destroy America’s priceless, heritage forests (whoops, we mean worthless wildlands) in catastrophic fires. The idea is to burn them down sooner so they don’t burn down later.
...
Does this make sense? Burn our forests down so they don’t burn down? It makes sense to the Dale Bosworth, Chief of the FS, because he signed onto all the recommendations in the Audit.

The trouble with prescribed burns is that they are hard to control - they result in both not enough fuel removal, and far too much -- causing the inferno that fire fighting was supposed to stop in the first place. The sad thing is, we already know a better way - mechanical removal of fuel. Of course, that brings up the dreaded L word - logging. But the science is clear:

Our findings indicate that fuel treatments do mitigate fire severity. Treatments provide a window of opportunity for effective fire suppression and protecting high-value areas. Although topography and weather may play a more important role than fuels in governing fire behavior (Bessie and Johnson 1995), topography and weather cannot be realistically manipulated to reduce fire severity. Fuels are the leg of the fire environment triangle (Countryman 1972) that land managers can change to achieve desired post-fire condition. However, in extreme weather conditions, such as drought and high winds, fuel treatments may do little to mitigate fire spread or severity.
...
There are at least three ways to reduce tree densities and accomplish fuel treatments: wildfire, prescribed fire and mechanical thinning. The first, natural fires, are often impractical. Letting natural fires play their historical role may have unwanted effects in forests that have undergone major stand structural changes over the past years of fire exclusion. Any fire started may result in historically uncharacteristic high severity. In many ponderosa pine forests choked with dense, small-diameter trees, or encroached by shade-tolerant trees, natural fires may no longer play a strategic role.

The second strategy for restoring these forests is large-scale prescribed burning. This is likely to be effective in stands that have moderate or low tree densities, little encroachment of ladder fuels, moderate to steep slopes which preclude mechanical treatment, and expertise in personnel to plan and implement such large prescribed burns. Large-scale implementation of this strategy will require funding for the planning and implementation over current expenditures and may require modifications to current air quality legislation. Future results of such expenditures may be seen down the road in lessened wildfire suppression costs, reduced fire severity, and reduced air quality impacts.

Mechanical tree removal, the third strategy, works best on forests that are too densely packed to burn, that have nearby markets for small-diameter trees, and areas where expertise and personnel are not available for prescribed burning programs. Mechanical tree removal may be accomplished by many different types of harvest, including precommercial thinning, selection or shelterwood harvest coupled with small-diameter tree removal, and thinning from below (Fiedler 1996). The goal is to manage forests for much lower tree densities leaving larger residual trees. Harvests to reduce wildfire hazard will remove small-diameter trees in contrast to traditional timber harvests. Mechanical fuel treatments can be very labor intensive, especially on steep slopes and in remote areas, and may not be commercially attractive due to the small diameter trees that need removal. To make fuel treatments more cost-effective for small-diameter trees, consistent markets are necessary (Nakamura 1996). Fiedler et al. (1997) assert that mechanized tree harvest on moderately-steep terrain coupled with removal of large amounts of biomass can generate considerable revenue. Periodic underburns and programs for restoring natural fire are critical to maintain these post-harvest stands.

In other words, go in and remove the undergrowth mechanically (i.e. logging, but not clear cutting), then use fire afterwards for maintanence. This was essentially the goal behind the Healthy Forests Initiative, but the logging (i.e. mechanical removal) aspects were controversial and unpopular with a lot of people. Another problem is that the trees and underbrush to be removed isn't what timber companies are really after. So it looks like will be mainly using fire to fight fire for a while longer.

BTW, if you aren't getting Missouri Conservationist Magazine, you should be if you have any interest in the Midwestern Great Outdoors.

Computer Modeling of Cancer

If we can predict the weather, can we predict the course of a tumor? Vito Quaranta, professor of cancer biology at Vanderbilt, thinks so. So he and colleagues from Vanderbilt and the University of Dundee
are computer modeling cancer tumors to understand them better and eventually tailor individual treatments:

The investigators have focused on the events of invasion and metastasis (movement of a tumor to distant sites), Quaranta said, because these events mark "the critical transition of a tumor that in the end will be lethal for the patient." A tumor that does not penetrate the surrounding tissue can often be surgically removed with curative success.

"When a patient comes in with a tumor, we'd like to understand for that particular tumor, what are the chances that metastasis is going to occur," Quaranta said. "Does that patient need to be treated very aggressively, or not so aggressively""

Today, a tumor's size and shape are evaluated, but they can be poor indicators of invasive potential: a very small tumor can be highly invasive. Even "molecular signatures" – profiles of molecules that suggest how tumor cells will behave – are not entirely predictive, he added.

Quaranta and colleagues opted for a new approach – using the tools of mathematics to tackle the complex problem of cancer behavior.

The findings suggest that current chemotherapy approaches which create a harsh microenvironment in the tumor may leave behind the most aggressive and invasive tumor cells.

"In the immediate term we may be diminishing tumor burden, but the long term effect is to have a much nastier tumor than there was to begin with," Quaranta said. There is anecdotal evidence, he added, to support the idea that changes to the microenvironment result in a tumor with more or less invasive potential. Such manipulations of the microenvironment could offer new directions for cancer treatment, he said.

Turns Out My Kid Can Draw Like That

Physists give, and physists take away. The ability to be a master of chaotic motion that is:

In articles that appeared in scientific journals and news magazines including Nature, Physics World and Scientific American, Taylor and coworkers also claim that fractal analysis can be used to distinguish Pollock's drip paintings from imitations.

Intrigued, Jones-Smith began to examine Taylor's articles, but quickly found that the work was seriously flawed She showed that doodles that she could make in minutes using Adobe Photoshop were as fractal as any Pollock drip painting, vividly refuting Taylor's claim that Pollock was able to generate fractals by hand only because he had attained a mastery of chaotic motion.

Jones-Smith presented a pointed critique of Taylor's work to Case astrophysicists and was encouraged to write up her critique for publication. But since Taylor's original work had appeared in Nature five years earlier, she thought interest in the topic had waned.

Is Success Hereditary?

German researchers say that success is hereditary -- or at least the willingness to take risks and the willingness to trust other people runs in families. And along the way they discovered that likes, not opposites attract.

Parents shape the character of their offspring, who in turn prefer to choose a partner similar to themselves. These two effects could contribute to attitudes such as willingness to take risks and confidence in others being "inherited" across several generations. At the same time these character traits are decisive, among other factors, for economic success. "Every economic decision is risky, whether it is about buying shares, building a house or just starting to study at university," Armin Falk emphasises. "On the other hand success in business also involves the right amount of trust."

Counterintuitive: Adolescents Reason Too Much

Here's important reading for all of us with adolescents: Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making.

Is it a good idea to swim with sharks? Is it smart to drink a bottle of Drano? What about setting your hair on fire -- is that a good thing to do?

People of all ages are able to give the correct answer (it's "no," in case you were wondering) to each of these questions. But adolescents take just a little bit longer (about 170 milliseconds longer, to be exact) to arrive at the right answer than adults do. That split second may contain a world of insight into how adolescents tick -- and how they tick differently from adults.
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It is often believed that adolescents think they are immortal, just plain invulnerable to life's slings and arrows. This notion is often used to explain why young people are liable to drive fast, have unprotected sex, smoke, or take drugs -- risks that adults are somewhat more likely to shy away from.

Research shows that adolescents do exhibit an optimistic bias -- that is, a tendency to underestimate their own risks relative to their peers. But this bias turns out to be no more prevalent in adolescents than in grownups; adults commit the very same fallacy in their reasoning. And actually, studies on perception of risks by children, adolescents, and adults show that young people tend to overestimate their risks for a range of hazards (including car accidents and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS), both in absolute terms (i.e., as compared with actual risks) and relative to adults. Their estimation of vulnerability declines rather than increases with age.

So why do adolescents take risks? Decision research answers this with another counterintuitive finding: Adolescents make the risky judgments they do because they are actually, in some ways, more rational than adults. Grownups tend to quickly and intuitively grasp that certain risks (e.g., drunk driving, unprotected sex, and most anything involving sharks) are just too great to be worth thinking about, so they don't proceed down the "slippery slope" of actually calculating the odds. Adolescents, on the other hand, actually take the time to weigh risks and benefits -- possibly deciding that the latter outweigh the former.

So adolescents engage in just the sort of calculations -- trading off risks against benefits -- that economists wish that all people would make. But economists notwithstanding, research is showing more and more that a faster, more intuitive, less strictly "rational" form of reasoning that comes with increased experience can often be more effective. Mature or experienced decision makers (e.g., experienced vs. less experience physicians) rely more on fuzzy reasoning, processing situations and problems as "gists" rather than weighing multiple factors and evidence. This leads to better decisions, not only in everyday life but also in places like emergency rooms where the speed and quality of risky decisions are critical.

These counterintuitive conclusions about the decision-making processes of young people have major implications for how to intervene to help steer them in the right direction. For example, interventions aimed at reducing smoking or unprotected sex in young people by presenting accurate risk data on lung-cancer and HIV may actually backfire if young people overestimate their risks anyway. Instead, interventions should focus on facilitating the development of mature, gist-based thinking in which dangerous risks are categorically avoided rather than weighed in a rational, deliberative way.

I guess you can throw those books out that tell you to calmly reason with your child to get them to see the error of their ways and go back to "Because I said so!"

It looks like McCoy wins the argument -- who needs a Spock to calculate the odds of almost anything when you can imploy McCoy's fuzzy logic so much faster to arrive at the correct answer.

Maybe its a good thing many teenagers factor in their parent's natural overreaction when deciding whether to engage in risky behavior. So parents, let's up the ante and overreact to just about everything. Put your thumbs firmly on the scale of right behavior.

It supports my personal study of non-adolescent reasoning, namely, that adults simply do what they think is right and engage in reason only after the fact when pressed to provide reasons for what they did.

Ride My Bipolar SeeSaw

Everything old is new again, and today's example is the so called Bipolar Seesaw freshly discovered. The bipolar seesaw is the swing in temperatures between the two poles of earth, where if its up in one pole its down in the other. But how freshly discovered is it? Well, here's an article from 1998 about -- ta da -- the bipolar seesaw, complete with polar ice cores showing temperature fluctuations.

Even more interesting is this 2001 article by Wallace S. Broecker that ties it all together:

Geologists are now investigating whether these groupings correspond to another new source of evidence of cyclic patterns in Earth’s recent history. This evidence comes from studies of sediment in the deep waters of the North Atlantic. The rock fragments in these sediments are much too large to have been transported there by ocean currents; they could have reached their present location only by having been frozen into large icebergs that floated long distances from their point of origin before melting. During the past decade, Gerard Bond, my colleague at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has studied the makeup of such ice-rafted debris. Noticing that some of the sediment grains were stained with iron oxide, he reasoned that they must have come from locales where glaciers had overrun outcrops of red sandstone. Bond concluded that a detailed analysis of deep sediment cores would reveal changes in the mix of sediment sources over time. This proved to be an excellent strategy, for Bond found something so unexpected that it stunned all of us who study climate history. The proportion of these red-stained grains fluctuated back and forth over time from lows of 5 percent to highs of about 17 percent, and these fluctuations had a pattern: a nearly regular, 1,500-year cycle. Even more amazing, he found that the cycles ran virtually unchanged, in both amplitude and duration, through both ice-age and non-ice-age periods during the last 100,000 years.

Bond puzzled over what might be pacing this cycle. As a geologist, he knew that the sources of the red-stained grains were generally closer to the North Pole than were the places yielding a high proportion of “clean” grains. At certain times, apparently, more icebergs from the far north were making their way well to the south before finally melting and shedding their sediment. Bond hypothesized that the alternating cycles might be evidence of changes in ocean-water circulation.

Ocean waters are constantly on the move, and water temperature is both a cause and an effect. As water cools, it gets denser and sinks to the bottom. In one part of what I like to call the “bipolar seesaw,” the bottom layer of the world’s oceans comes from cold, dense water sinking in the far North Atlantic. This causes the warm surface waters of the Gulf Stream to be pulled northward, as they are today. Bond realized that during this part of the ocean cycle, a large proportion of the icebergs that bear red grains would melt while still fairly far north. But sometimes the ocean reorganizes itself, and the Southern Hemisphere holds sway in driving ocean circulation. At such times, surface waters in the North Atlantic would generally be colder, permitting icebergs bearing red-stained grains to travel farther south before melting and depositing their sediment.

Did the Rise of Mountains Cause the Lowering of Temperatures?

I'm a global warming skeptic - and by that I mean I'm skeptical that human actions are the driving factor behind current climate change. Now, that doesn't mean we aren't, that just means I'm not convinced that we are. So I read this article on a connection between the Appalachian Mountains and global cooling with interest -- not because it supports my skepticism, but because it doesn't.

One such debate is whether atmospheric carbon dioxide truly drives Earth's climate. The planet has shifted between greenhouse conditions and icehouse conditions throughout its history, and research from Saltzman's team strongly suggests that carbon dioxide levels are a key cause.

"In this study, we're seeing remarkable evidence that suggests atmospheric CO2 levels were in fact dropping at the same time that the planet was getting colder. So this significantly reinforces the idea that CO2 is a major driver of climate," Saltzman said.

...

"We observed a major shift in the geochemical record, which tells us something must have changed in the oceans," Young said.

The timing of the strontium ratio decline matches the rise of the Appalachian Mountains . The crustal plate underneath what is now the Atlantic Ocean pushed against the eastern side of North America, lifting ancient volcanic rock up from the seafloor and onto the continent.

This kind of silicate rock weathers quickly, Young explained. It reacts with CO2 and water, and the rock disintegrates. Carbon from the CO2 is trapped in the resulting sediment.

The chemical reaction that weathered away part of the Appalachians would have consumed large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere –- right around the time that the Ordovician ice age began.

So we have one case, and the article goes on to say that the rise of the Himalayas may have caused our current ice age (we're in an interglacial period at the moment). So now we have two possibles, and wikipedia claims there have been 4 major ice ages.

That leaves us with some unanswered questions, like what about the other two ice ages, and how did CO2 get back into the atomosphere to end an ice age, and what is driving our current cycle of glacials/interglacials? I'm still stuck with suggestive, but not conclusive.

Necessity

Congratulations to Matthew Haugland, winner of the 2006 Collegiate Inventors Competition for inventing a better way to forecast nighttime temperatures:

When Matt Haugland was a child in San Jose, California, he remembers that his parents gave him a small thermometer that he used to measure the temperature in different spots around his yard. Although the yard wasn’t large, Haugland was fascinated by the temperature differences in the different parts of his yard. As he grew older, he became fascinated by the microclimates of the San Francisco Bay region and the reasons behind them.

Consequently, Haugland hoped to own land for the purpose of researching the microclimates on it. In 1999, he transferred from school in San Jose to the University of Oklahoma in search of affordable land. He bought a five-acre plot and installed several weather stations across it. Through his research, based on weather observations from these stations, Haugland developed a weather forecasting technique that accurately predicts nighttime temperatures.

As Haugland says, “I’m hoping that this model will help improve weather forecasts around the world.” The implications of his work are broad, from helping farmers protect their crops from frost and freezing, to helping predict nighttime fog formation, the biggest weather-related cause of death in transportation.

You should also check out the Inventor's Hall of Fame while you're at it.

New Meaning To Dress For Success

After reading this story about how researchers investigated how women dressed differently during their menstrual cycle and discovered, I kid you not:

A new study shows that young women in relationships may dress a bit more enticingly as they reach the ovulation phase of their monthly fertility cycle — the time when they are most fertile.

First, who thinks up these studies - nerdy men who want to meet college women? This really addresses a burning question about human behavoir.

Secondly, I'm not surprised that women would dress "more enticingly" and that's because women are a lot hornier as ovulation approaches. I'm wondering when that bit of research gets done.

Bonus tip: Men are always horny, except when sporting events are on TV.

A Jug Of Wine, And Thou

You can get a grant for a study like this?

Studies to date looking at the association between alcohol consumption and risky sex, however, have largely used potentially biased clinic-based samples or alcohol venue-based sampling strategies [2,4,10,13,16,17]. In addition, risk factors for heavy alcohol use itself with regard to sexual behavior have not yet been adequately characterized. Finally, there are few data on whether the relationship between alcohol and risky sex is the same for men and women, and on the interplay between alcohol, intergenerational relations, and sex exchange. We therefore set out to assess the following in a large, population-based sample covering rural, urban, and semi-urban areas in Botswana: (a) the prevalence and correlates of heavy alcohol consumption; and (b) gender-specific relationships between heavy alcohol use (as a primary independent variable) and a number of HIV transmission risk outcomes, including having unprotected sex with a nonmonogamous partner, having multiple partners, and paying for or selling sex in exchange for money or resources.

Lasers And Chlorine Dioxide

You want to eat healthy, which means eating your vegetables, but you're scared because of outbreaks of food pathogens like E. Coli and Listeria. You've read that washing it, even by the supplier, isn't always effective. And when you find out that growers in the Salinas Valley, where most of the country's produce is grown, use tertiary treated sewage effluent for irregation, you really don't want to eat your vegetables.

But Purdue has your back. Researchers at the Purdue University have devised a one-two punch to knock out food pathogens. First, they have a laser system to detect the pathogens, and then they kill them with Chlorine Dioxide gas.

"If the product is safe, but nobody will eat it, that's not what we want," Linton said."We are always thinking in terms of, "Will this work for industry?' In this case, I believe the answer is yes. I would like to see this technology used regularly by industry in a couple years from now."

Both technologies have the potential to help prevent food-borne illness, Linton said, but he also noted that following proper agricultural practices is as important, if not more important, for food safety.

Since E. coli, or Escherichia coli, is found in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, it does not naturally contaminate most produce. Therefore, following more stringent sanitary policies, as well as practicing better manure and water management, can go a long way to help prevent future outbreaks, Linton said.

The New Phonebooks are Here!

The Nobel prize winners have been in the news lately, and so here is a complete listing:

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed

LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."

BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

That would be the Ig Nobel prizes, that is. They are awarded to those who first make people laugh, then make them think. Something we strive mightily for here at funMurphys, but without the coveted award.

Some winners got into the spirit, as this press release shows.

LSD and Alcoholism

You can't make this stuff up. A history of medicine professor at the University of Alberta, Erika Dyck, has rediscovered studies from '60s Canada that show LSD can be an effective treatment of alcholism.

According to one study conducted in 1962, 65 per cent of the alcoholics in the experiment stopped drinking for at least a year-and-a-half (the duration of the study) after taking one dose of LSD. The controlled trial also concluded that less than 25 per cent of alcoholics quit drinking for the same period after receiving group therapy, and less than 12 per cent quit in response to traditional psychotherapy techniques commonly used at that time.

Published in the Quarterly Journal for Studies on Alcohol, the 1962 study was received with much skepticism. One research group in Toronto tried to replicate the results of the study, but wanted to observe the effect of LSD on the patients in isolation, so they blindfolded or tied up the patients before giving them the drug. Under such circumstances, the Toronto researchers determined LSD was not effective in treating alcoholism.

The Saskatchewan group argued that the drug needed to be provided in a nurturing environment to be effective. However, the Toronto researchers held more credibility than the Saskatchewan researchers--who were led by a controversial, British psychiatrist, Dr. Humphry Osmond--and the Saskatchewan group's research was essentially buried.

Wikipedia has more about Dr. Humphry Osmond, the man who coined the term "psychedelic" and who's middle name was "Fortescue", including this bit about the study in question:

Osmond is also known for one study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with acute LSD treatment, resulting in a claimed 50% success rate. He also treated Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W. with LSD with positive results. There exists however an alternate version of the events that is told by psychiatrist Abram Hoffer, MD. Osmond and Hoffer not only worked with LSD but also with niacin, which is now called vitamin B3. It is Bill W. himself who made this term popular, after he realized, thanks to the two researchers, the antipsychotic potential of this vitamin when given in supraphysiologic doses. B3 became known as a treatment for alcoholism, as well as for LSD-induced and schizophrenic psychosis Vitamin B-3: Niacin and Its Amide by A. Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.. The underlying adrenochrome and kryptopyrrole (mauve factor) hypotheses were met with stiff, unsubstantiated opposition. The B3 protocol for alcoholism, despite encouraging results, fell into oblivion amongst the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, which gradually became a faith-based organisation reflecting the orientations of the other AA co-founder.

Natural Frankenfoods

Where do you stand on genetically engineered crops? Personally, I'm all in favor and don't see a whole lot of difference between seed companies selecting for traits and a scientist taking a short cut and inserting the actual gene(s) they want, even when the gene comes from a completely different organism. But not everyone sees it that way, and they do raise some valid points. Certainly not all engineering is equal, but what about the most basic complaint -- that such engineering is not natural? Well, research into the past genetic history shows that such staple crops as rice and corn (maize for all you britishers out there) have undergone massive genetic alteration over time:

"Our findings elucidate an active evolutionary process in which nature inserts genes much like modern biotechnologists do. Now we must reassess the allegations that biotechnologists perform 'unnatural acts,' thereby creating 'Frankenfoods,'" said Professor Joachim Messing, project leader and director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

By comparing corresponding segments of two maize (corn) chromosomes with each other, and then to a corresponding segment of rice, project scientists reconstructed a genetic history replete with "reconfiguration and reshuffling, reminiscent of working with Lego blocks," Messing said.

Public awareness groups have argued that genetic engineering of crops deviates from "natural processes" when biotechnologists insert genes at seemingly random places, altering the normal order of genes in the genome. The view of genes being fixed in their position in the genome is largely based on studies in animal genomes. In contrast to those studies, however, the authors show that plant genomes evolved from a far more dynamic structure than previously believed.

Well, I think that answers the basic objection; all the rest are really ones of process and can dealt with by reasonable people -- and should be.

Giant Anti-Sucking Sound

I just couldn't resist the title of this article: World’s biggest whoopee cushion helps kids understand the science of sound. Who says science can't be fun? Not Professor Trevor Cox, that's for sure:

Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at Salford University, will deliver this Royal Institution Science for Schools lecture. It is the biggest live event ever to be organised by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and their first-ever collaboration with the Royal Albert Hall. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded the research that forms the basis of the lecture and helped to fund the development of the show.

Audience participation will feature strongly throughout the event. Volunteers will be encouraged to sit on a specially made 2 metre-diameter whoopee cushion – the largest in the world – to demonstrate exactly how wind instruments work. The physics involved when whoopee cushions make a noise is the same as blowing through the mouthpiece of a saxophone, for instance (although the sound produced is quite different!). Trevor’s whoopee cushion will also be assessed at the event for a place in the Guinness World Records.

Dobson, Seipp, and HPV Vaccination

Cathy Seipp is a smart person, so why does she her analysis of the response to an HPV vaccine stumble so badly?

First off, she claims that certain religious fanatics are attacking the new vaccine for HPV:

One of the first things I had my 17-year-old daughter do when she began college this fall was make an appointment to get the new anti-HPV (for “Human Papillomavirus”) vaccine at the university’s student health center. HPV is the sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer, and the new vaccine (which in my view should only be celebrated, as should all medical progress) has been attacked by religious fanatics almost as soon as it was introduced. ‘Why, this will only encourage young girls to have sex!’ Or so that kind of thinking goes — if you can even call it “thinking.”

OK, what is Focus on the Family's position? Oddly enough, they have a .pdf position statement on their web site:

Recognizing the worldwide detriment to individuals and families resulting from HPV, Focus on the Family supports and encourages the development of safe, effective and ethical vaccines against HPV, as well as other viruses. The use of these vaccines may prevent many cases of cervical cancer, thus saving the lives of millions of women across the globe. Therefore, Focus on the Family supports widespread (universal) availability of HPV vaccines but opposes mandatory HPV vaccinations for entry to public school. The decision of whether to vaccinate a minor against this or other sexually transmitted infections should remain with the child’s parent or guardian. As in all areas of sexual health and education, Focus on the Family upholds parents’ right to be the primary decision maker and educator for their children. The use of these vaccines should involve informed consent for parents as well as education for both parents and youth regarding the potential benefits and risks of the vaccine. In making this decision, parents should consider the following:
• No vaccine is 100% effective against disease;
• There are more than one hundred sub-types of HPV and the current vaccines being tested are effective against, at most, four of these;
• The sub-types of the virus that these vaccines protect against are the cause of most but not all cases of cervical cancer;
• The possibility of HPV infection resulting from sexual assault, including date rape;
• The possibility that young persons may marry someone previously exposed to and still carrying the virus;
• The HPV vaccines do not protect against other STIs or prevent pregnancy;
• The HPV vaccines do not, in any circumstance, negate or substitute the best health message of sexual abstinence until marriage and sexual faithfulness after marriage.

Hmm, how about Family Research Council:

The Family Research Council welcomes the news that vaccines are in development for preventing infection with certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV). We also welcome the reports, like those we've heard this morning, of promising clinical trials for such a vaccine. Forms of primary prevention and medical advances in this area hold potential for helping to protect the health of millions of Americans and helping to preserve the lives of thousands of American women who currently die of cervical cancer each year as a result of HPV infection. Media reports suggesting that the Family Research Council opposes all development or distribution of such vaccines are false.

...

We will also continue to take an interest in the activities of the pharmaceutical companies, the federal and state governments, and of the medical community, as vaccines for HPV are approved, recommendations for their use are developed, and their use is implemented. In particular, we encourage follow-up studies to determine whether use of the vaccine has any impact on sexual behavior and its correlates, such as rates of other sexually transmitted diseases or rates of pregnancy.

We are particularly concerned with insuring that medically accurate information regarding the benefits and limitations of an HPV vaccine is distributed to public health officials, physicians, patients, and the parents of minor patients. It is especially important for those parties to understand that such a vaccine:

* will not prevent transmission of HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, of which there are many;

* will not prevent infection with other strains of HPV, of which there are also many;

* will not prevent infection with all of the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer;

* and lastly, will not eliminate the need for regular screening.

We recognize that the most current immunological studies suggest that these vaccines would be most effective in pre-adolescents. Our primary concern is with the message that would be delivered to nine- to twelve-year-olds with the administration of the vaccines. Care must be taken not to communicate that such an intervention makes all sex "safe." We strongly encourage the health care community to clearly communicate the medically accurate fact that only abstaining from sexual contact with infected individuals can fully protect someone from the wide range of sexually transmitted diseases.

However, we also recognize that HPV infection can result from sexual abuse or assault, and that a person may marry someone still carrying the virus. These provide strong reasons why even someone practicing abstinence and fidelity may benefit from HPV vaccines.

Because parents have an inherent right to be the primary educator and decision maker regarding their children's health, we would oppose any measures to legally require vaccination or to coerce parents into authorizing it. Because the cancer-causing strains of HPV are not transmitted through casual contact, there is no justification for any vaccination mandate as a condition of public school attendance. However, we do support the widespread distribution and use of vaccines against HPV.

Vaccination at the beginning of adolescence may provide a unique opportunity for both health care providers and parents to discuss with young people the full range of issues related to sexual health. We would encourage this committee to recommend that policy-making bodies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, should develop and formalize clinical counseling interventions directed toward sexual risk elimination strategies for pre-adolescents. Such strategies could be incorporated into anticipatory guidance protocols. Such a strategy would also mirror the risk elimination messages presented to adolescents regarding tobacco, alcohol, and drug usage, and youth violence prevention. This risk elimination message is the best form of primary prevention youth can receive.

Both health care providers and parents should reinforce the fact that limiting sexual activity to the context of one faithful and monogamous long-term relationship is the single most effective method of preventing all sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancies, and the whole range of negative psychological and social consequences that can result from sexual activity outside marriage.

OK, how about Jerry Falwell? Silent on the issue.

National Abstinence Clearinghouse? OK, I admit I'm not a member and don't want to join so I can't actually see what's in their resource library, but here are some titles:

07.05.2006 More on HPV and Condoms…
06.29.2006 HPV Vaccine: How Much Will it Cost?
06.21.2006 HPV Vaccine: Progress, But the Battle’s Not Over Against HPV
05.24.2006 HPV Vaccine Clears FDA Hurdle
04.26.2006 Data from Eight Collected Studies Shows Enormous Risk of Cervical Cancer from HPV
04.07.2006 New Way to Encourage Someone to Test for STD
04.05.2006 Teens and STDs: A New Message for a Healthy Millennium

Now perhaps these organizations have all moderated their opposition after the FDA approved it and I'm (admittedly) late to the party. But that isn't what is claimed. Now to be sure there may be some people out there actually flat out opposed to the HPV vaccine who are Christians, but I'm sure not seeing some movement by any influential organization.

But it doesn't end there. Ms. Seipp continues:

This naturally brought out all the true believers in hordes -- many of whom insisted that my comparison of vaccines that prevent disease to locked doors that prevent burglars is wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't see why. Some of these people insist the analogy is flawed because airbags and seatbelts encourage people to drive more recklessly, not less.

But while it's true there are some studies that indicate improved safety features in cars do make some people feel inoculated against road hazards and so more likely to speed, what about people like me? I never speed and haven't had a traffic ticket in 26 years -- pretty much what you'd expect from a typical Volvo-driving fuddy-duddy...whose seatbelts always fastened, and whose car has airbags.

It's true my analogy about burglars and disease may be imperfect, but it's nevertheless essentially true. One person, for instance, said I should have used the example of theft insurance instead of locked doors. But I don't see why. Vaccinating against disease and locking your doors against burglars both recognize that we live in a world where bad things can happen even if we don't deserve them. Recognizing that fact no more encourages promiscuity than locked doors encourages burglary; both are simply precautions.

Now let's take up the question of whether or not reducing the risk associated with a behavior increases the incidence of said behavior. That is the what is claimed again by Ms. Seipp as the religious fanatic's objection to this vaccine.

So her analogy is that since locking your doors at night doesn't encourage burglars, making sex less risky won't encourage sex. There are two problems that make her analogy a non-sequitor. The original is about how your ability to lower the risk of your behavior to yourself encourages you to do more of that behavior. The analogy is about how your ability to (1) increase the risk of (2) someone else's behavior doesn't encourage them. Gee, when you get to stand the other person's points on their heads, you can easily refute them.

Now a reader tries to rescue her "One person, for instance, said I should have used the example of theft insurance instead of locked doors. But I don't see why." Here's why: the analogy becomes just because you have theft insurance [lower the risk] you don't stop locking your doors at night [risky behavior]. The reason you should use it is that it actually conforms to the logic of the objection. I have to admit I don't have data, but I'd say there are more people who would take less precautions with their property knowing they would be paid for a loss than there are who would take more.

But I don' have to think too hard about this, because we already have data about this very effect, and Ms. Seipp cites it - anti-lock brakes and airbags have made people feel safer, so we have engaged in riskier driving behavior to the point we are no safer, and even less safe than before. So we have valid evidence that low and behold, if you lower the risk of a certain behavior, people will do more of it.

And how does Ms. Seipp respond to actual real hard data? Anecdote. Hey I own a safe car and I don't engage in risky behavior. OK, what does that have to do with the measurement of real behavior by real people? Yep, none.

As far as Ms. Seipp's analogy, how about we ask the question, if burglars were given a "get out of jail free" card that really worked, even if only once, would they commit more or less burglary? I don't have to think too hard about that one.

But one has to ask, so what? As far as I can tell, what Focus on the Family and Family Research Council are warning against is a false sense of security - that is they don't want the message to be that because of this vaccine, sex has been rendered safe and complication free. Kind of like, just because you lock the front door everynight, don't think you can't be burglarized.

A better response would be that given all of the factors that go into becoming sexually active, the risk of HPV is pretty far down the list and is just not very significant, and that the risk that young girls would misjudge and take this vaccine as a license for risk free sex could be overcome through the proper education -- which sound a lot like the positions take by those religious fanatics at FOTF and FRC.

So what did I learn from reading Ms. Seipp in this case? Nothing about so called religious fanatics. But I did learn that even smart, reliable people goof: they don't accurately represent other people's positions, they don't reason well, they dismiss data if it disagrees with their opinion, and in general can just go off half-cocked. And yes, I'm sure if you were a glutton for punishment and went through my archives you could find similar problems from time to time.

If A Tree Is Not In The Forest, Can You Hear It Fall?

What tree doesn't like a forest? The Live Oak, which apparently is the introvert of the tree family. A study of the live oak by University of Florida researchers reveals that live oaks are under pressure in Florida (an no doubt elsewhere) from the encroachment of other trees:

It is an irony of nature that the successes of reforestation and urban forestry threaten live oaks, which in the past maintained the elbow room they needed from logging, cattle grazing and frequent fires, said Putz, whose work is published in the June issue of Forest Ecology and Management. “We are confusing our natural savanna heritage with forested landscapes and the tragedy is that the forest is killing live oaks,” he said. “If we allow other trees to grow up too close to the live oak, the live oak will die. Our research clearly establishes this fate in both rural and suburban landscapes.”

...

Based on these findings, Putz said he believes more than half of the live oaks in the city of Gainesville alone are in danger of being destroyed by encroaching trees, a process that can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years and is most rapid in the suburbs where lawns are fertilized.

The problem is widespread because suburban sprawl and forest expansion are threatening savannas and open-canopied woodlands in many parts of the world, Putz said.

“The trees of these savannas, from the oaks of California and Europe to the acacias of Africa and the legumes of tropical America, are all likely to suffer when forest trees encroach on their crowns,” he said. “In the U.S. alone, savanna is the natural vegetation all across the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas.”

Saving live oaks sometimes means having to kill other trees, which can be expensive, but preserving a single live oak can add as much as $30,000 to the value of a house, Putz said. Furthermore, having a live oak nearby is good protection against hurricane damage.

Diabetes, Not Obesity Kills

I count this as good news/bad news - obesity by itself carries no extra risk of early death, but diabetes sure is a killer. Since obesity is a significant risk factor in diabetes, and being overweight is no picnic, don't start ignoring your size. And in light of the last post about how scaring people into action is ineffective, this quote makes double sense:

"Telling an overweight person that they either need to lose weight or they will die is the wrong message," he says. "There is increasing evidence that aggressively treating diabetes and other risk factors that go along with obesity, like cholesterol and high blood pressure, is even more important than losing weight."

But JoAnn Manson, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, doesn't buy the idea that diabetes alone is responsible for the increased risk of early death in people who are obese. Manson led the team which reanalyzed the CDC data. She tells WebMD that there is plenty of good evidence implicating obesity in death from cardiovascular disease and several types of cancer, as well as diabetes.

"There are clearly pathways through which obesity increases the risk of death that do not involve type 2 diabetes," she says.

Read This Blog Or Else!

"You can't scare people into getting fit or going green" says the Economic and Social Research Council. No word on if you can scare people into voting Republican. No rebuttle from the Catholic church or Jewish mothers, either.

The team identified 33 distinct strategies for changing intentions and behaviour across the 129 different studies. The most frequently used strategies provided general information, details of consequences and opportunities for comparison. Yet the most effective strategies were to prompt practice, set specific goals, generate self-talk, agree a behavioural contract and prompt review of behavioural goals. The two least effective strategies involved arousing fear and causing people to regret if they acted in a particular fashion.

Actually, I'm not sure how they got from the most effective strategy for a personal trainer to you can't scare people into adopting your position. I guess it 's the difference between you can't scare people into actually doing something about the environment but it's easy to get them to pay lip service to the environment, you know people who natter on about what you can do while doing nothing themselves.

Bigger Is Not Happier

The latest word on breast implants is a study from Canada that concludes that breast implants are safe - however, they are not effective. The researchers studied almost 25,000 women who had implants to determine that those who had cosmetic breast implants had the same mortality rate as the general public -- actually, it was lower -- but they had a significantly higher suicide rate -- 73% higher. The study authors concluded that the lower mortality rate was due to double selection bias - they were healthy and wealthy enough to undergo cosmetic surgery. So they compared the women who had other cosmetic surgery to the general public and got similar results - lower morality, higher suicide rate. So while the researchers say implants are safe (with reservations for individual complications), I say they are not effective since they do not seem to be a long term fix -- based on the increased suicide rate, they do not do what the woman is hoping for.

The Science of Diversity

Does a diverse student body matter to a school? Has there been any study on its effectiveness at changing attitudes among students? OK, a study at long last a study has looked at this question and determined, that yes, "Children's racial attitudes may be related to ethnic composition of their school":

"These findings inform our knowledge about the role that contact with members of different ethnic and racial groups plays in children's intergroup attitudes," said Dr. Killen. "This contact, under the right conditions, can foster positive attitudes towards 'outgroup' members."

Mortality and Race

John Edwards liked to talk about 2 Americas while on the stump, but he was wrong according to the latest study of mortality in America. Wouldn't that be a great headline over the articles - "Edwards Lied"? OK, turns out there are eight Americas:
Asians, northland low-income rural whites, Middle America, low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, western Native Americans, black Middle America, southern low-income rural blacks, and high-risk urban blacks. Although looking at the numbers, they could have had sixteen Americas by dividing each group by gender. I guess they thought that was excessive. Or they could have just divided it between men and women and then Edwards would have been right.

Hmm, is there any link between life expectancy and test scores?

Interestingly, based on Figure 1. Alaska and the frozen north seem to have the highest life expectancies - maybe we should all move to the Arctic to maximize our life expectancy.

I like the Middle America category - its neither race nor geography based, it's basically the left overs from the other seven. Middle America sounds so much better than Leftovers, though. Or average White People, which is overwhelmingly what the category is.

According to Figure 3, the difference in life expectancy between Asians and the next group, Americans who sey eh, is much larger than between any other groups.

Would they have made a much bigger deal about the gender difference if it were women on the short end of the life expectency? Just curious.

Why I Don't Understand "Medical Ethics"

I guess I don't undertand medical ethics. You'd think providing healthcare in the manner that causes the least deaths would be the most ethical way, right? Wrong, according to Dr. Sally Blower discussing the best strategy to treat AIDS in South Africa:

Using data from the KwaZulu-Natal province for their parameters, researchers from UCLA and the University of California, San Francisco, devised a mathematical model to predict the impact of drug allocation strategies that the South African government is implementing to treat 500,000 people by 2008. These data included birth rates, natural death rates and death rates stemming from AIDS.

They looked at three drug allocation strategies: one that would allocate antiretroviral drugs only to the city of Durban and two making them available in both urban and rural areas.

Of those, the Durban-only strategy would be the most effective in preventing new infections, reducing them by up to 46 percent -- amounting to preventing an additional 15,000 infections by 2008 -- compared with the two strategies that would include both urban and rural areas. The strategy also would avert the greatest number of deaths from AIDS and generate the least amount of drug resistance.

But major problems would emerge with that approach, said Sally Blower, professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and senior author of the study. Most important, this approach is against basic ethical principles guiding treatment equity and would lead to more urban/rural healthcare disparities than already exist.

"If there was rational planning, you could determine drug allocation strategies by balancing ethical objectives with epidemiological objectives," said Blower, a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. "But it's obviously unlikely that this type of rational planning would or could occur. So it's much more likely that the actual drug allocation strategy will be determined by a mix of politics and feasibility."

She added: "Unfortunately, you can't have the maximum impact on the epidemic and be ethical."

I suppose it goes hand in hand with the whole no money for organ donors even if it increases organ donation because while the doctors, nurses, orderlies, janitor, and the hospital itself are being paid to perform the operation, it would just be wrong to pay the donor.

Fluid Dynamics Meets Finite Element Modeling

Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation to study what happens when a airplane crashes into a building for use in studying the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. The researchers had earlier developed a simulation to investigate the 9/11 Pentagon attack.

"As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity," Sozen said. "We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

"Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane's fluid contents."

...

Santiago Pujol, an assistant professor of civil engineering, worked with the researchers to develop experimental data to test the accuracy of the simulation by using an "impact simulator" to shoot 8-ounce beverage cans at high velocity at steel and concrete targets at Purdue's Bowen Laboratory. These data enabled the researchers to fine tune and validate the theoretical model for the simulation.

"We created a mathematical model of the beverage can and its fluid contents the same way we modeled the airplane, and then we tested our assumptions used to formulate the model by comparing the output from the model with that from the experiment," Sozen said.

Who says science can't be fun and relevant? I bet shooting the coke cans into steel and concrete targets was a blast -- the Mythbuster guys are so jealous. Personally, I'd worry about scaling up from 8oz coke cans to a plane weighing over 200,000 lbs, but that's just the engineer in me, but I understand the difficulty in trying to set up a test anywhere close to full scale. Of course, if they used beer cans, I can see that researchers might decide that enough data had been collected before they were all used.

OK, in all seriousness, this is some real science and engineering, and might even help with those people who claim it wasn't planes that brought down the towers or hit the Pentagon.

Pluto Is Too A Planet

Astronomers can take Pluto away when they pry my dead, cold fingers from it.

And let's not even mention Uranus.

A Real Breakthrough

For those of us who object to embryonic stem cell research because it destroys human life, this is a real breathrough: removing a single cell from an embyro. The embryo is apparently unharmed, and the single cell can be used for stem cells.

Right now, my biggest objection is changing apparently unharmed into definitely not harmed. Since the procedure of removing a cell has already been performed on many people who started life in vitro, I'm hoping that they can be studied to determine the safety of the procedure.

There is the concern as well that this involves experimentation without consent. One answer is that it is already being performed, so we aren't talking about something new. But more fully, the question is one of safety. Unlike cloning , where animal clonings have shown real problems and for which I would have big concerns for that reason, this method has been used for testing purposes on people and again apparently isn't a big problem. If there are problems, then I would object that it is experimentation without consent.

As to the claim that you could, through further manipulation, create a clone embryo and thus human life this way, I'm not impressed. The possibility exists that someday any cell may be turned into an embryo via manipulation, but I'm not going to stop brushing my teeth because I knock a few cells loose from my cheeks and flush them down drain when doing so.

I have to guard my optimism because medicine is a field that over announces breakthroughs -- but tends to deliver improvements.

Dark Matter Revealed

Astronomers looking at a collision of two giant galaxy clusters have concluded that dark matter is real, not just an inconvenient explanation of certain astronomical observations. Dark matter now joins a growing array of phenomenon that we know exist only indirectly. What a strange place the universe is.

Radiocarbon Dating and Climate Change

Last Saturday I took the kids up to the Mesa Lab to see the “Climate Discovery” exhibit at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR has a lot of graphs and other illustrations about climate change. I asked the tour guide how the climatologists sort out which is the cause and which is the effect, between carbon dioxide and temperature?

The guide brought out Caspar Ammann and Carrie Morrill, both of whom I knew from past presentations (they both have PhDs). This was a public conversation at a public event, so I can report it here. Caspar pointed out the correlated graphs of CO2 and temperature proxies, taken from the Vostok ice core (~420,000 years). He remarked that it is difficult to sort out cause and effect from the ice cores alone. As the air bubbles become trapped in the ice during compression over the first 100 years or so, some CO2 migrates by diffusion between the annual layers. The effect is that the annual CO2 and temperature signals are not as precise over very short time scales, and the lead/lag relationship between the peaks can be obscured. I didn't pursue this line of inquiry further because I plan to investigate the ice core data myself as a project for Climatology class during the upcoming fall semester.

However, Carrie told me that the increase in CO2 displayed by the Keeling Curve can indeed be attributed to human burning of fossils fuels, and here's how: The air is getting older. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, and it can be used to date objects up to about 50,000 years old. Carbon-14 decays into Nitrogen-14 through beta decay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14

Objects older than 50k years have only the N-14 isotope. By measuring the ratio of Carbon isotopes in organic material, one can determine how many years have passed since that organism was last exposed to the air. We can measure the age of all this carbon dioxide that's building up in the atmosphere. The following article at RealClimate.org states:

How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87

“Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase -- around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning.”

I spent some time looking for a graph of Carbon isotope ratio vs. time that would show the “dramatic” change at 1850, but couldn't find one. If you have a link, please post it below.

If temperature rise were currently forcing CO2 rise “naturally”, we would expect newer CO2 to get flushed from the earth's surface. But it's old CO2 that's getting flushed instead, and the most obvious cause is human burning of fossil fuels.

The astute reader may wonder, How do we know that the older CO2 isn't merely coming out of the Arctic peat bogs? The bogs will flush more CO2 as the Arctic climate gets warmer, and peat bogs are really old.

Carl's answer: The trend of older atmospheric CO2 has been going on since about 1850, which is the start of the Industrial Revolution:

http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/02.01.jpg

Global temperature rise didn't really get going in earnest until about 1975. We've only been flushing out the peat bogs for about 30 years, not 150 years:

http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/05.16.jpg

.. And Love Global Warming

I'm going to buy me a nice big straw hat, lots of sunscreen, and lose enough weight to look good in my new swimsuits. Because I'm hoping Mr. Gore is right and I'll have beach front property here in Missouri in a few months. Why not celebrate the Earth getting warmer when the alternative is that it will get colder, and I know which one of the two I prefer. Even if you think that global warming has something to do with what people are doing (and I don't), I figure that since it's taken us decades to put carbon dixoide into the atmosphere it will take decades to get it back out which means it's going to be around a while so you might as well enjoy the ride.

Less Is More

How is the brain and the military alike? Less is more. By that I mean for the brain, it isn't about working hard, its about working efficiently, since studies show the better a person is at a task, the less the brain works to perform it. And for the military, it isn't about bringing more firepower, it's about putting minimum firepower precisely on the target -- again, it's not about working hard, its about working efficiently.

And I don't think those are the only two areas where this applies.

Genetic Screening

I'm a firm believer that human life starts at conception, and I'm the father of a daughter who had two congenital heart defects, one life threatening -- coarctation of the aorta -- and one not -- VSD. Erin had an operation when 3 months old to remove the constricted section, and had a balloon angioplasty when 2 to break up the scar tissue that was causing a recurrance. We worried that our next child would also have heart defects. So I greet this news with mostly joy and only slight trepidation: New genetic testing of In Vitro Fertilized embryos can detect genetic diseases.

Such testing could help reduce, or even possibly eliminate a lot of genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Such testing could bring great peace of mine to anxious parents. Hence the joy. Of course the question immediately arises for me what happens to the embryo's that test positive. And one wonders how far do we go - do parents select embryos based on other characteristics, such as eye color? Hence the trepidation. I'm not one to stop a good because a bad may come later, especially when we can draw a line later against the bad. So I'm not too worried about what might happen years from now. But I am concerned with what happens now, namely what happens to the embryos. I can't imagine requiring a parents to have a child we know has a terrible disease, and yet just as I can't kill children once born with a terrible disease, I'm against destroying the embryo. So would it be too much to ask to hold onto the embryo until they can be cured -- until their genetic defects can be repaired? I don't think so.

More Fun With Intestinal Bacteria

It's just not possible to overstate the importance of intestinal bacteria to your well being. Part of that is simply a fine economy - why should your cells do what 3 pounds of bacteria can acomplish in your gut. The other part is that one dies without the other. Scientists have had a hard time investigating the full toxonomy of your gut flora, mainly because they don't live well outside you. But scientists have developed a way to find out what's in there, and the answer is one hell of a lot: more than 60,000 genes (or twice the human genome) and thousands of different strains of bacteria and archaea. So how did they manage to collect this treasure trove?

Rather than struggling to grow the body's myriad microbes and testing their ability to perform various biochemical reactions – the methods scientists traditionally use to classify bacteria – the team used tiny molecular probes resembling DNA Velcro to retrieve tens of thousands of snippets of bacterial DNA from smidgeons of the intestinal output of two volunteers.

My problem isn't that I eat too much, it's that my gut bacteria are too efficient. Researchers (from right here in St. Louis) say that the amount of calories you actually extract from food depends on what's living in your gut. My next question would be how much of what's in you depends on what's in your parents? I can just imagine that in the future, we'll be imbibing different mixtures of gut flora to lose weight or bulk up.

And how about downing a nice mixture of whipworm eggs and gatorade? Yum, yum, but even better than the taste is that it might help people with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's. The theory is the worms give your immune system something to do and so it leave the rest of you alone. Needless to say kids, don't try this at home, wait for an FDA approved treatment.

Avian Flu Transmission

Why is the bird flu that has us all so worried not transmitted human to human (yet)? The virus doesn't bind to receptors in the upper respitory tract (i.e. nose and throat) and instead binds to receptors deep in the respitory tract (think lung, specifically alveoli). So scientists will now start monitoring for any changes in the virus's ability to latch on and invade upper respitory tract cells, which would mean easy human to human transmission. Whether such a shift is detected in the lab before people start dropping like, well, birds, is more than an academic question.

Breast Asymmetry Linked to Cancer

In a study with 504 women, researchers at the University of Liverpool led by Dr. Diane Scutt found that a difference in breast size was linked to an increased risk of cancer in a fairly linear way, with every 100 milliliters of difference equating to an increase in the risk of cancer of 50 percent. The average breast size is approximately 500 milliliters, so we're talking fairly sizable differences here.

You can tell the caliber of the news organization by the headline (and photo) they chose to run with this subject:

BBC: "Uneven breasts linked to cancer"

Daily Mail: "Uneven breasts may increase cancer risk"

Xinhua: "Breast asymmetry may increase cancer risk in women"

Atlanta Constitution Journal: "Asymmetrical Breasts May Raise Cancer Risk"

Elites TV: "Study: Breast Size Matters When It Comes To Cancer"

Glasgow Daily Record: "MATCHING BREASTS ARE BEST"

The Sun (UK): "Lopsided boob risk"

Huge Explosion Caused Global Warming?

Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that our current global warming is due to changes in the level of atmospheric water amounts caused by the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908. Hmmm.

Bacteria Numbers

A school girl did a wonderful science project - comparing the number of bacteria in the ice they serve you versus the number in their toilet water at fast food restaurants. Her answer is quite unappetizing as she discovered that in most (70%) locations there were more in the ice than there were in the water. Ugh. I do remember that when I was in Pakistan the leader of a detachment of seabees building terrorist defenses at the American Consulate told me how he was fanatic about keeping ice machines clean and disinfected because they could cause illness pretty easily. And don't even get me started on soft-serve ice cream dispensers.

Beware the people who compare the number of bacteria on some surface to the number of bacteria on a toilet seat -- they are misleading you with that comparison because the toilet seat has the fewest number of bacteria of any location in a bathroom - mainly because peoples butts and thighs (and yes, urine) don't have a lot of bacteria on them, and the (toilet) seats are routinely disinfected. And besides, you can only get skin type infections in the parts of your body that come into contact with the seat, at least if you're using the toilet properly that is. Generally, toilet seats are down right sterile compared to most other surfaces you regularly come into contact with. If the number of bacteria bug you, stay off the floor of a public restroom.

But the important thing isn't numbers, but variety of bacteria. For instance, should you be grossed out by that figure of 3 million bacteria on a computer keyboard? Well, when you consider that your very own personal body has 10 times more bacteria than you have cells, or a whopping 100 trillion (give or take a few trillion), that 3 million on the keyboard is insignificant. What matters is if there are any pathogens and your own general health since a lot of stuff that is normally harmless will turn on you if you let your guard down. It doesn't take many salmonella to ruin your day.

The best defense against bacterial invaders are clean hands and clean food. The 100 trillion that are already there will take care of the stragglers.

Not All Side Affects Are Bad

Viagra, its not just for erecitile dysfunction anymore. Researchers investigating Crohn's disease have uncovered evidence that it may be caused by an excess of bacteria allowed to flourish due to a sluggish immune system and they speculate that viagra could improve the blood flow to the intestine (I guess it isn't site specific) which would help clear the bacteria.

Coming on the heels of the discovery that rifaximin, an antibiotic used to treat diarrhea, also works for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it would appear that intestinal bacteria are like women: can't live with them, can't live without them.

Too Good to Be True

Moderate consumption of alcohol reduces the odds of obesity. So maybe those beer adds where whippet thin yuppies meet to run and then have a light beer aftwards isn't so far fetched after all.

Maybe this is just good news for me, given as how I have far more than I want, but research by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine indicates that stem cells from hair follicles help heal skin.

I sit on the pinnacle of happiness because I said "I do" 17 years ago.. Or in the words of a researcher "Some commitment appears to be good, but more commitment appears to be even better", and marriage is a the top of the committment heap.

Ice Flowers

I was at a friend's house last night and he was showing pictures he took that morning at first light in Rockwoods Reservation of ice formations that had formed on particular plant stems on north facing slopes. The formations were small, some looked like leaves, some looked like shells, and some looked like nothing else. We joked that they were little ice flowers; apparently he isn't the only one to have spotted them:

Dr. James Carter
More Dr. James Carter
D. Bruce Means
More D. Bruce Means
The Missouri Conservation Department
The Weather Doctor

Pretty Cool

Physics and Heavenly Bodies

Speaking of good work if you can get it:

To best support breasts, a designer has to understand how they move. To that end, McGhee's team in Australia, headed by biomechanist Julie Steele, tags women with light-emitting diodes and asks them to run on treadmills. (The women run with and without bras, so the laboratory doors are bolted to prevent uninvited people from bursting in.) Computer systems then track the breasts' motions in three dimensions by following the moving lights. "We can actually work out exactly where they're going, how they're moving, and how this movement is affected by bras," Steele says. Breasts move in a sinusoidal pattern, Steele has found, and they move a lot. Small breasts can move more than three inches vertically during a jog, and large breasts sometimes leave their bras entirely. "We have videos of women who, particularly if the cup is too low, spill all over the top," Steele says.

Too bad Victoria's Secret wasn't hiring engineers back when I got out of college!

If you can get past the snicker factor, it really is an interesting article on the physics of bras, at least for me as it combines two of my favorite subjects.

But there is a more controversial part to the article

Evolutionary biologists aren't sure why breasts evolved as they did—chimpanzees and other mammals develop them only when lactating—and no one knows what keeps them from sagging.

How To Get Attention

I suppose these guys believe in Horoscopes too: Sleep researchers in England claim the position you sleep in reveals your personality. According to the researchers, I'm brash and gregarious. Yeah, right. I used to be quiet and reserved until the snoring (keeps the bears away!) got too bad. Did my personality change?

I thing somebody thought if they issued a silly press release that was sure to be picked up by the media they'd get more attention (and funding!). Of course, I have no experimental data to back up that assertion, but then neither do they.

Skin Embryonic Stem Cell Fusion

Good news on the stem cell front - a Harvard group claims that they can turn skin cells into embryonic stem cells without having to form an embryo first. Instead, they fuse a skin cell with an existing stem cell and the result is an embryonic stem cell with the DNA of the skin cell (and thus the person who provided the skin cell). But before you get your hopes up that Aunt Jenny is going to walk tomorrow, the cells aren't exactly usable in humans because they are hybrids and the embryonic stem cell nucleus has to be removed before it can be used. So this is step on in a multi-step process. But at least it's a journey I don't object to.

Celestial Gravity Surfing

Science News has a really neat article about the real minimum energy transfer between planets. No, not the Hohmann transfer orbits I learned about in Orbital Mechanics class, but a solution to the three body problem. It uses gravity to do most of the work, and so while it takes a lot longer to get somewhere, it's eyepoppingly low energy - one mission only took 4% of total mass.

Stem Cells

They've found another source of stem cells -- hair follicles. Scientists have turned them into nerve, brain, skin, and muscle cells. I'm sure that with a little more time, the list will grow. Remind me again shy we have to have fetal stem cells to conquer disease when the adult body is rife with them?

Public Health Wins Another

Some good news for a change: the US has eliminated Rubella from our shores. I did my part years ago when the first vaccine came out and kids were vaccinated en mass with the new and thankfully no longer used vaccine gun. The day was grim: lined up at a local school with all the other kids from the area, hearing the worker at the start of the proceedure tell us that it would only sting a little while we could watch the kids getting their shots yell and cry from the pain, holding a bloody cotton ball to the their shoulders. That's a day I won't soon forget, but it was worth it.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Science marches on. We report, you deride.

Researches can tell from a single sample of saliva how many cavities a kid is going to get by the age of 30. They can even tell which teeth are at most risk. Apparently, it's all in the sugar chains. Now I'll be able to emphasize to my son if he should be brushing his teeth to avoid the drill or the cold shoulder.

Here's new meaning to giving someone the finger, but apparently you can tell something from the length of a man's finger.

A man's index finger length relative to ring finger length can predict how inclined that man is to be physically aggressive. Women do not show a similar effect. A psychologist at the University of Alberta, Hurd said that it has been known for more than a century that the length of the index finger relative to the ring finger differs between men and women. More recently, researchers have found a direct correlation between finger lengths and the amount of testosterone that a fetus is exposed to in the womb. The shorter the index finger relative to the ring finger, the higher the amount of prenatal testosterone, and – as Hurd and Bailey have now shown – the more likely he will be physically aggressive throughout his life.

"More than anything, I think the findings reinforce and underline that a large part of our personalities and our traits are determined while we're still in the womb," said Hurd.

At last scientists are studying something useful -- does the order you appear effect how you're judged during a competition. And the answer is: Go last if you want to be first. A researcher studied European ice skating competitions and the Eurovison song contest. I guess she was too busy in the lab to hear that ice skating is fixed.

The search for life in the Universe may be on going, but Astronomers now have good evidence that carbonated beverages exist out there with their discovery of a "burper". I hope they don't discover evidence of Mexican food in outer space. What's a burper? A source of intense bursts of radio waves that isn't a quaser. I guess I should be happy they don't name celestial objects after TVs anymore.

In another break through, researchers have discovered that people immersed in a virtual world don't notice pain. The virtual world the researches used was a game played wearing a special headset with two small computer screens and a special sensor, which allows the player to interact with the game and feel a part of its almost dreamlike world. Sounds to me like some researches wanted somebody else to pay for their video game habit. I know people that when immersed in a video game don't notice time, the urge to pee, or even how badly they smell. I can see big pharma getting rid of Vioxx and instead making high end video games. I'd like to develop that ad campaign: Video games - good for what ailes you.

Astronomers didn't take time off to celebrate their discovery of burpers, and also managed to discover the smallest star yet.

And a team of Astronomers in Cambridge, worried about being left out of all the discoveries, announced they discovered an invisible galaxy. Yeah, sure you did. OK, they really did, and this is important, because it's this giant dark galaxy made out of something so exotic that instead of getting silly and calling it noseum or no-frickin'-clue or bandersnatch they call it dark matter.

Summers Heat

In case you live in a cave, Harvard's president Larry Summers is in hot water for floating the possibility that there are more men who are innately outstanding in the sciences than women. This runs headlong into the academic consensus that the only difference between men and women is that women are more caring and nurturing than their male counterparts who would destroy the world if left to their own devices. OK, maybe the real academic consensus is that there aren't any differences between men and women that the obvious physical ones and any observed differences are due to societal conditioning.

I commented about my own experiences on women in college level physics (there weren't any when I got my degree) on an interesting post at Tom Maguire's. I'm happy to note that women now account for almost 25% of the bachelor's degrees in physics. As to why women are under 50%, I have to offer my succinct answer: I don't know. It could be that more men are innately talented in that field than women, just as I wouldn't be surprised if women weren't better in some other field of intellectual endeavor. I don't think you can just rule it out because you don't like it. Another alternative, one you probably won't hear from a university president, is that the level of teaching at the undergraduate level in math and science is generally wretched (that was my experience) and women are more likely to go into an area of study with better instruction. Again, the accuracy of the hypothesis can't be proven without proper experimentation. At least, that's something they did teach me in those physics classes back in college.

Pictures from Another Planet

I know Titan is technically a moon, but I still consider that the Huygens Probe landed on another planet and sent back images that to my untrained eye look a lot like Mars, only with more atmosphere.

The probe's mission was another fine scientific joint venture between the USA and Europe. Back when I was a rocket scientist, I worked on the launches of IRAS, which was another spectacular joint venture, and on EXOSAT, which was all European except for the launch, which was switched to Delta (which is what I worked on) from Ariane at the last minute because of an Ariane launch failure. I had a great time working with the Europeans on EXOSAT, and it just goes to show that in those endevors where Europe can pull its own weight (or more!) they make fine partners.

Science Trio

I saw three interesting science stories today, and amazingly, they had nothing to do with intestinal bacteria!

First up is the launch of Deep Impact, which isn't a movie but a satellite designed to rendezvous with the comet Temple1 and launch an "impactor" spacecraft designed to use kinetic energy to blow a big hole in the comet, allowing the mothership to take pictures and analyze the material ejected during the impact. That way we'll know what comets are really made of -- dirty snowballs, or something else below the surface. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't take $250,000 to report this, but I used to work on the Delta program in my long lost youth. The fireworks are scheduled for, when else, the Fourth of July

Hopefully, Greenpeace etc. won't protest this major destruction of comet habitat in the name of science.

Secondly, it isn't a story about a large wooden badger, but a giant dinosaur eating badger. Yes, you heard me right, fossils have been discovered in China of large badger like mammals that ate dinosaurs -- they found the fossilized dino in the belly of the fossil badger. In the words of one of the scientists, it was a "short-legged but powerful animal with fearsome teeth." Perhaps he meant big pointy teeth. I mean, the finding does competely overturn the view of mamals from that time as being small cuddly cuties that wouldn't hurt a fly (if there were any).

And lastly, Scientists now believe that the Universe isn't made of string, but is a giant flat bell. OK, I'm inflating things abit. Alright, enough cosmological humor. Scientists have confirmed that the early Universe rang with sound and the sound waves influenced the structure - galaxies etc. - of the universe. The good news is that the Universe is flat but wavy; the bad news is that the expansion of the universe isn't stopping; what began with a bang won't end at all.

Sandstorm Over Baghdad

I got an 'A' on my student paper, so it must have been halfway decent. You can read all about the dust storm that hit Iraq last year during Operation Iraqi Freedom at:

Sandstorm Over Baghdad: The Dust Storm that Stalled the Coalition Invasion of Iraq

Now that I've posted my report on the web, I can't understand why it looks to be less work than it really was! The paper is mostly about meteorology, but there are lots of pretty weather pictures and some satellite views of the Persian Gulf region.

And you might learn something new. Did you know that the Marines used captured AK-47s during the storm, since M16 rifles are more vulnerable to grit? I didn't.

In Other News ...

Yes, it's time to hear about my favorite topic -- intestinal bacteria. This time, it's a downside. The little critters may be responsible for obesity:

Friendly bacteria in your gut could determine whether you pack on fat or stay lean, according to new research from Washington University. A team of researchers led by Fredrik Backhed, Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon and Dr. Clay F. Semenkovich at Washington University discovered that bacteria, which are a normal part of the intestine, help unlock a gate that allows fat to enter cells for storage.

The researchers raised some mice in a germ-free environment. Those animals had no bacteria in their intestines and had little body fat. Mice that grew up in a conventional environment with bacteria in their intestines had 50 percent more body fat than the germ-free mice did, even though the mice ate the same amount of food.

The researchers then transplanted bacteria from the conventionally reared mice into previously germ-free mice. The animals ate no more than before, but dramatically packed on fat, increasing their body fat content 60 percent in two weeks, Gordon said.

I'm not overweight; I'm overcolonized by gut microbes.

Thar She Blows!!!

What are you doing reading this blog when you could be watching Mt. St. Helens erupt from the comfort of your desk??!!! Check out the Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam:

http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

There was a pretty good-sized puff this morning! A big plume of steam and ash belched out of the crater and sailed up higher than the camera's view. Pretty cool.

Look, I know that we're in the midst of a hard-fought presidential campaign, al-Qaeda terrorists are trying to kill us all, Iraq is not yet a functioning country, construction workers just cut down a bunch of beautiful locust trees outside my new office, and I can't seem to get Swing icons to draw in color. We've got problems, no doubt about it.

But when I can sit here at my desk, write Java code to implement my new OutlineView, and watch a volcano erupt in real-time - it's good to be alive!

Man's Best Friend

I'm a dog lover. There will be no cat blogging on this blog. Now I have even more reason to prefer dogs - they can smell bladder cancer in human urine. If this works out in a real diagnostic setting (and so far the reliability is too low), it's easy to imagine what comes next.

On a related note, a co-worker is on a dog search and rescue team. She was out practicing with her group at a plane crash site when one of the dogs, trained as a cadaver dog, started turning up body parts. They called the sheriff's department, and by the time they arrived, they had a sizable amount of human remains and plane parts. I don't know about you, but I spend my weekends in less important but more enjoyable pursuits.

Unhealthy Suburbs?

Is urban sprawl really responsible for bad health? Count me among the skeptics, despite the RAND study that says it does.

Virgin Galactic

I have to laud Richard Branson for taking space flight to the next level - private flights. I wish him success. But I have to laugh at the name - Virgin Galactic, no, not the Virgin part, the Galactic part. Truth in advertising would have the new firm called Virgin Sub-Orbital, but I guess that doesn't have the same ring to it as Galactic.

Missouri - Predicted Weather

Local scientists using a regional climate model predict that the western midwest won't warm as much as the rest of the world:

"The so-called "hole" in global warming will stretch for hundreds of miles and include Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma, Saint Louis University officials said. The findings are published in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The modeling showed that warming in the United States will be stronger in winter than summer and stronger at night than during the day," said Zaitao Pan, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Saint Louis University. "But we found what looked to us like a 'hole' in the daytime warming in summer, which was a surprise."

Ray Arritt, agronomy professor at Iowa State, said to expect more rainfall and wetter soil in the future. As a result, more of the sun's energy will go into evaporating water than heating the air, he said.

One Of My Favorites

I've been busy (forcast - no clearing in the busyness for a long time), so thankfully Carl has provided a good substantial post below. I'm going to have to go with one of my favorite topics: intestinal bacteria. They have a good side, and a bad side, and the latest is bad -- intestinal bacteria cause Crohn's disease, an unpleasant ailment. Here's hoping that knowing what strain causes it will lead to a cure.

Eat More Berries

Add another color to the palate of what's good for you. Blue, as in blue berries, helps lower triglycerides and the bad cholesterol while increasing the good cholesterol. But only a few strains of blueberries have the right chemical -- pterostilbene (a name only a scientist could love). I wonder how blueberrys smothered in tomato paste tastes.

Knee Bones Connected To The Thigh Bone

Charles Austin -- who's sadly given up blogging again -- claimed that walking and running the same distance burned the same number of calories, running just did it faster. Well, both Charles and Bruce were wrong, because baby we were born to walk. Unlike other creatures, people burn far more calories running than walking. And running is especially hard on the knees and quads. I could have told you that, but the article does it so much more scientifically.

Too Cheap To Meter

Good news on the energy front. Australian researches say they've found a way to split water and thus provide hydrogen using titanium coated ceramics. It would require a shift over to a hydrogen based energy system, but say good bye to pollution, carbon dioxide, and oil embargoes. I hope it pans out, but as always with revolutionary breakthoughs, caution is advised.

Back to School

I'm back in school again, roughly 22 years after clutching my precious leather-bound diploma at Stanford University in June 1982. I have enrolled in a Master's program at the local university. With a full-time job, a full-time wife, and three little children I thought it would be best to take only one course at a time. So I'm on the five-year plan for a Master's Degree.

Some things have NOT changed about college since Kevin and Sean and I were on The Farm with John Elway. College students look and behave exactly the same. They still carry backpacks, ride bicycles (except Kevin), stand in line during registration, wear scruffy clothes, and sit in the sun while trying to do their homework. They still sit in lectures and take notes.

What HAS changed is the delivery of material, thanks to PowerPoint and the Internet. I remember sitting in the Physics Tank (Bloch Hall, demolished in 1997) taking notes, madly trying to keep up with the professor writing on the board, and hoping I had copied all the essential formulas before he went on to a new greenboard. I even had one of those nifty four-color pre-med pens! Now my instructor posts the lecture notes on the class web site the day before class, so we can print them out and make any additional notes in the margins while he lectures. This is a big improvement since I don't have to watch helplessly as my hasty handwriting gets more and more illegible trying to keep up. I know that I've gotten all the important material, that I have all the correct parameters to the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. The downside is that it puts us students into more of a passive mode during class, and it's all too easy to zone out especially if Graham has kept me up the night before.

I am taking Dynamic Meteorology, one of the core courses leading to a Master's Degree in Atmospheric Science. At the first class our professor showed us a spectacular animation of the earth's general circulation over several months. One could clearly see great gobs of moisture tearing off the North Pacific and slamming into the Alaskan panhandle and British Columbia. Yee-hah!

Maybe someday I'll post a little primer on global warming. ;-)

Global Warming, Local Cooling

Apparently global warming is coming for Europe first; I know its sure left the American midwest the heck alone this year. We've set record low lows and record low highs right here in St. Louis this summer. And it's not just our imaginations about being a cool summer -- the leaves are turning red early. It's mid august and the dogwood in my front yard has already started to turn red. I ought to take a picture just so next time somebody tells me about global warming I can look at the picture and see for myself.

More Favorite Subject

Rand answered my musings below. What he's let on so far (I appreciate that he can't tell everything he knows) is intriguing. If you take the wing of the Busemann biplane, which is a theoretical model going back to the thirties (twenties?-- I took my Liepmann and Roshko home last night and left it there), at zero alpha and at discrete Mach numbers controlled by the geometry it has no wave drag as the shockwaves are completely contained within the two wings. Sadly, it also generates no lift at this condition because of symmetry. I don't have a picture, but essentially the airfoils are very roughly triangular with the upper one flat on the top and the lower one flat on the bottom, so a chordwise view looks like a 2-D converging-diverging nozzle - or a De Laval nozzle. Interestingly, this nozzle is used mainly to accelerate subsonic to supersonic flow, or to achieve constant flow rates despite fluctuations in back-pressure (pressure downstream of the exit), or as rocket engine nozzles. Here though, the flow is already supersonic before entering.

In the Busemann biplane, the airflow is compressed beneath the upper wing and thus has higher pressures on the bottom that the top, which is lift. The bottom wing would operate in the exact same way, only upside down which leads to no net lift. The secret of lift at zero alpha is then to replace most of the lower wing with a jet of air with higher energy than ambient. While the lower wing would provide a small amount of negative lift, the upper wing due to its much larger area and much greater compression would provide far more positive lift. The question is, will this jet eliminate the shocks from the upper wing in the same way a correctly sized solid lower wing would? I don't know -- and even if theory tells you it's possible, that doesn't mean you could actually achieve such a state with real equipment in real life (which Rand is clear about himself).

One of the interesting things is that the wing would operate at a fixed Mach number without shocks. Since you couldn't vary the angle of attack, the only control of lift at cruise is altitude. Thus you'd fly a particular altitude for a particular weight -- once you got to your cruise Mach, the plane would either float up or down until it reached the altitude that its lift equaled its weight. Then it would float steadily upwards during cruise as it burned fuel.

Even if such a wing did work, life isn't all roses. You have the structural issues of making the wing, especially the lower one which will have to be small, hollow for this high energy air to flow through and out of, and strong enough to take the loads. And you still have the whole rest of the plane. What do you do about the shockwave the nose of the aircraft generates? I know it can be mitigated by high fineness ratio, but not eliminated. I suppose the nose shape could be such that the shock only went upward. If not, this shock also has implications for wing placement - the wing will most likely operate without shocks in a very narrow Mach range. Behing the nose shock the Mach number will be lower than in front of it, and unless you can design this wing to also handle have a region through a shockwave, the wing will have to be completly behind the shock. There are also control surfaces to worry about. It's fine to have your wing produce constant lift, but control surfaces have to be able to vary their forces and moments. You'd get shocks and wave drag off of them. You could use engine thrust vector control, but you'd need it in all three axes.

I think you still have a problem in getting to cruise. This wing wouldn't be particularly good at subsonic flight, and I'm not sure you could put flaps in the wing without causing problems at cruise. Thrust vector control would help again here, but you sizing the wing for takeoff and climb versus cruise would be a problem. And because the wing design allows for zero wave drag only at certain supersonic Mach numbers, you'd still have to blast your way through the transonic drag wall at high angle of attack. My engineering judgement tells me that such a transport, when all said in done, will have more expensive acquistion and operating costs than current subsonic transports. High enough to outweigh the benefits of faster travel

So what I see is a fairly straightforward science problem -- will this semi-solid Busemann biplane wing design eliminate wave drag -- coupled with a host of engineering problems. And really, this is the sort of thing NASA should be all over. Start the funding off to assess the science problem first, and then if it looks feasible, start on the engineering problems. Solving engineering problems is what puts the joy into engineering.

A Favorite Topic

Aerodynamics. I know everybody loves the subject. OK, it put food on my table for a long time and I have to admit that after a few years away I grow nostalgic. I came across a a post that was a followup to an argument in the comments at Transterrestial Musings about shockwaves, which led me to an article by Rand Simberg at TechCentralStation about a company that was trying to develop vehicles that could fly supersonically without shockwaves.

Let's say you eliminate or reduce the shockwaves associated with supersonic flight to the point that noise isn't an issue. Drag is still the enemy (drag is always the enemy to an aerodynamicist). And by that I mean, even if you have the same drag coefficient at supersonic as you do at subsonic -- your drag, and thus fuel consumption, will increase substantially. Drag increases as the square of the velocity, so if you go twice as fast, the drag is four times higher. Your increased velocity isn't enough to offset this, but it does help; in this case, assuming an engine (not necessarily the same one) with the same efficiency at the higher speed as the lower speed, the fuel consumption per mile will be double at twice the speed.

Next up is the concern Rand raises about high flight. I'm not convinced this goes away. Not only does drag go up as the square of the velocity; so does lift. So what you say? The problem is that for maximum range, you want to fly at your max L/D or lift over drag. But at cruise, lift is fixed -- it's the weight of the airplane. At a given velocity, you'll fly at an angle of attack based on your weight since lift is also a function of angle of attack. And your L/D is a function of angle of attack - and generally, your max L/D is going to occur at a high angle of attack, close to the onset of stall. So for range, you want the smallest wing possible - so you can cruise at your max L/D. The only way to control angle of attack for a constant velocity, constant weight is to control altitude - the higher the altitude, the higher the angle of attack. This is why planes perform step climbs during their flights - as they burn fuel and lose weight, they have to climb to keep their angle of attack, and thus their L/D, up. (Ideally you'd climb constantly, but air traffic control doesn't allow this.) So all things being equal, if you're flying twice as fast, you want a wing with a quarter of the area. But you also have to be able to fly low and slow, since that's where you start out. So you if you fly twice as fast at cruise, you have to either develop high lift devices (e.g. flaps) that are four times more effective (not likely), or you have to have more wing than is optimum for cruise and fly higher to compensate (and you probably still won't be as good as subsonic transport). When you throw in that the kind of design that will not create shockwaves will have poor subsonic performance, I'm understating the case. So yes, if you didn't have to worry about takeoff and climb to cruise, you could put on a smaller wing (or whatever you call your lift device) and fly lower.

While you might be able to have a more conventional engine placement, I'm not sure what kind of engines you're going to use. Given that there are no shocks, or only weak ones, will you need scramjets - engines that work with supersonic airflow? Or will you somehow slow the airflow to subsonic for the engines without shocks? The SR-71, which flies the kind of speed profiles we're talking about uses a hybrid turbojet/ramjet engine. Will something similar be needed? I know the design is pretty old, but those engines gulp fuel at low speeds.

In the comments, one of Rand's critics claimed Newton's Laws cause shocks, which led into a long digression over the rocket thrust equation. Let me just note the proper equations are Navier-Stokes, and no I'm not going to discuss them much here beyond noting that my fellow students and I were impressed by my fluid dynamics professor who could write the darn things out from memory - including various coordinate systems and assumptions (inviscid, incompressible, etc.) It may well be that you can formulate designs and circumstances where you don't get shockwaves in supersonic flight; I just don't know how real they are.

What is interesting to me was the connection of the shockwave to circulation. Let's take a step back. Current theory (and practice) tells us that if you have a blunt leading edge, you get a strong shock in front of the leading edge with high drag. If you have a sharp leading edge, you get a weak attached oblique shock with much lower drag. The claim is that with enough leading edge sharpness and the proper contouring behind, you can fly supersonically without shockwaves, except circulation (flow around the airfoil) which produces lift elimates the shockless effect. Why would this be? Well, without lift on a sharp symmetric airfoil the stagnation point would the the leading edge. If you add circulation, perhaps you move the stagnation point so that it is no longer on the leading edge. Could this be the problem? The flow splits at the stagnation point (that's where it stops), and if it isn't sharp where it splits, you get a shockwave? If that is the case, well, we're screwed. No amount of adding in balancing circulation downstream will matter, and adding it to the flow over the wing to cancel it out will mean an end to the lift from the wing. Now you could make an unsymmetrical airfoil such that at the cruise condition the stagnation point is on the sharp point of the airfoil, but you'd have shockwave drag getting to that point (or if you had to fly off design point.)

In a nutshell, I don't think it will work, and even if it does, you still have to be able to mass produce it. But that's the fun of engineering -- solving difficult problems, especially the ones you don't see the answer to when you start.

Will this revolutionize air transport? Well, Rand is clearly right that it will have a better chance than what's come before, but I don't know if that will be enough. Unless you increase engine efficiency, you'll have twice the fuel consumption at cruise and fly higher than currently. So the question is, is there a large enough market of people willing to pay higher prices for faster flights? And that may be the largest uncertainty; you won't know the answer until you've actually built the planes and put them into operation.

UPDATE: Rand has posted a response that provides more information. Some of my thoughts are obsolete at this point.

Without a dialtone you can fool yourself

Perhaps you have experienced this: a long silence in a cell phone conversation leads you to believe that what you said is so profound you have put the listener into an crisis of existential doubt or contemplation of heretofore unrecognized vistas of possibility. Hey, it could happen. More likely the connection has dropped. There has to be a new word for this, the mistaken sensation of having delivered a profound remark when it was just a line drop. This can occur on any communications medium that doesn't have a dial tone (e.g. most cell phone connections, many VoIP (Voice-over-IP or Internet telephony) and some instant message systems) when the long silence following your last statement (or lack of interruption) leads you to believe you have your audience enthralled.

And for some other ways that you can fool yourself take a look at Harvard's Your Disease Risk (hat tip to Research Buzz and figure out where your diet/lifestyle have put you in the various lotteries for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. In a health context you might interpret the flatline EEG as the dialtone, but determining who answers or who you answer to after "hearing it" is an exercise I leave for the reader.

Warming Followed By Cooling. Repeat.

As the weather warms with spring, global warming returns to the media. So we are bombarded with not just news stories, but turkeys ("As God is my witness, I thought they could fly!") as well, like The Day After Tomorrow. I don't mind a silly movie - I thoroughly enjoyed Independence Day by the same crew, but at least then they didn't think they were making a documentary about the hazards of global despoiling aliens. As to its scientific accuracy, the fact that the book it was based on was co-written by Art Bell is all I need to say. As a movie, try the fifteen minute review, or if you want something shorter, here's my academic review:

See Dick Cheney. See Dick oppress. See W. See W. die off camera. See a lot of people die. See Dick Cheney again. See Dick Cheney apologize for being a white male oppressor and for all other white male oppressors. And they lived happily ever after abandoning their wicked oppressive ways and living in peace and harmony with the land and the historically oppressed peoples on it.

The InstaReview would be "feh."

I have every confidence that with the cooling that fall and winter brings, the spectre of global warming will disappear from the media conciousness, except for the pelting of Al Gore with snowballs when he makes dire predictions about how hot it's getting in a speech delivered during a blizzard. I have every confidence that vagaries of the weather, unpredictable as it has always been and as it remains despite our best models and computers, will continue to be blamed on global warming by its true believers. Last week we had spring weather in St. Louis - hail, strong winds, torrential downpours, tornado warnings. This was the indication of spring beginning to give way to summer for most of us; to others, a dire warning of global warming.

The Vegans Strike Back

Tom McMahon links to a Snopes entry about the late Dr. Atkins, his weight, and his death. Tom rightly notes that their pleasure in his death is despicable. But the Snopes article got me to thinking.

I'm not a doctor, but both my father and daughter have heart disease. My father, who is overweight and over seventy, has the kind most people think of, but my daughter's (she just turned 13 - anybody have a good recommendation on an inexpensive yet effective shotgun?) is congenital. My daughter is as skinny as a rail and would be the last person you'd ever think has any issues with her heart. They're all behind her, we hope. I mention it only because it is instructive when people think "Yeah, right" about claims Dr. Atkins' heart disease had nothing to do with his diet.

The Snopes article says Atkins went from 195 lb when he was admitted to the hospital to 258 lb at his death a week later - all the while in a coma. The hospital shoved over 65 lb of saline solution into his body. My father has had a number of operations -- and every time they put a constant saline drip into him just after they get him the gown. This has caused him to go into congestive heart failure on several occasions. After the first time, he always asks them to go easy on the saline, but they never do -- something about standard proceedure. At least now they give him a quick shot of lacix and cut back on the saline, but they always wait until he has a problem. If Atkins did have a weak ticker, and it came out before the accident that caused his death that he did, I can easily believe that 65 lb of extra saline would have caused heart failure and worse. In fact, I have to wonder about a medical establishment that would pump 65 lb of saline into a patient with heart disease.

As to the Atkins diet itself, well, I still take my vitamin pills even though Adele Davis died of cancer; I still think excercise is good for you even though Jim Fixx died of a heart attack while jogging. Controlled studies are the answer, not the anecdote of what happens to a single person.

Mars From Above

I don't know about you, but I didn't realize that there was more to the European mission to mars than the Beagle 2 lander. So it came as a bit of shock to read about the exquisite picturea the orbiter (dubbed Mars Express) was taking of Mars. Expect the unexpected, and more really cool pictures.

Science Round Up

Mercury levels in Tuna caught off the coast of Hawaii haven't changed in the last 27 years, reports Science Blog. Accordingly, the mercury in these fish is more likely to be coming from a source other than pollution, which has increased airborne mercury over the same time period.

Eat your beans, they are good for you. I'm not touting them just because I'm selling candles for the cub scout pack fundraiser, but because they contain significant quantities of flavinoids, nature's own anti-oxidants. The darker the bean, the better, although no word if that also influences musical production as well.

The long delayed Gravity Probe B satellite is getting close to launch. It was conceived before me; it was kicking around the halls of Stanford back when I went to school there; and it will be launched on a Delta II from Vandenburg AFB - the kind of mission I worked on in my youth. Enough about me, though. It hopes to answer the question, does space twist as well as bend? Or to put in scientific terms, does the earth drag space time with it as it spins -- what's known as frame dragging, and a still unproven prediction of General Relativity. If your eyes haven't glazed over yet, be sure to hit the links to learn more.

Amazing News

We can cure Juvenile Diabetes in mice using spleen cells. If this works in people, this is big news, as well as puzzling. Why cells from the spleen should regenerate the pancreas is a mystery.

Its My Gene's Fault

Science Blog reports on the discovery of an appetite stimulating gene called GAD2. One form of the gene stimulates the appetite much more than the other, an in what should be a surprise to no one, the people with the non-stimulating form were more likely to have normal weights. I have a good idea which form my wife (who can go from starving to full in three bites) has, and which form I (who never feels full as much as painfully stuffed) have.

Intestinal Bacteria Byproducts

Here's a fun article about flatulence. It reports some of the findings of fart doctor extraordinaire Michael Levitt.

Women and men break wind just as often - although the volume may be lower with each puff.

Loudness and odor are uncorrelated - silent isn't necessarily deadly (but it sure can be!).

Hydrogen Sulfide not only gives flatus (the technical name for fart) its pungent aroma, but is as deadly as cynanide in the blood stream - no wonder is smells so bad.

This article has not only the the facts about flatulence but also the wonderful phrase "high drama flatulence".

One of the other benefits to the early stages of the Atkins diet - less flatulence because of the reduction in carbohydrates that fuel the bacteria that make it.

One last thought to leave you with on this subject: you have roughly 10 times more bacteria living in your gut than you have cells in your body, and getting rid of them isn't an option.

Science Hype

All too often, science is hyped. Well, new "discoveries", anyway. Sometimes, it makes sense- such as the reports from a few years ago that since cancer could be easily cured in mice, a cure for human cancer was only a matter of a couple of years. Sadly, that hasn't been the case. And sometimes, I have to admit its my own emotions running away from me (I'm a sucker for any story that could be headlined "important new breakthrough") - like when I saw the headlines of this New Scientist article: "Tiny tubes squeeze electricity from water", and then read the first paragraph: "If the output can be increased, says Larry Kostiuk of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, then high pressure water could one day be used to power small devices such as mobile phones and calculators." I stayed with them through the explanation of the effect, but then a deluge of cold water arrived with: "To increase the current, they will need to increase the efficiency of the device. At the moment, says Kostiuk, "it's really pretty pathetic - a fraction of a percent."" Translation: Not in my lifetime. Heck, I'm still waiting for the efficiency of photovoltaic cells to increase to the point that solar power is cheap and ubiquitous.

Blueprint For Intestinal Bacteria

Science Blog reports that a research group and Washington U. has completed sequencing the genome of one of the most prevelent bacteria in the human gut. The leader of the team, Jeffery Gordon M.D. notes (if you are a clean freak, or squeemish, do not read the following) that the adult human body, is composed of 10 times more microbial cells than human cells. I really hope that's a misquote.

Myopia Is Hereditary

Now I have another thing to blame my parents for - my nearsightedness. Although my mother was barely nearsighted, my father not at all until late in life (as he would put it "I'm near sighted on my distant vision and farsighted on my near vision"), I'm very nearsighted, and my brother had better than average vision. According to researchers at Ohio State University, your chance of developing myopia (nearsightedness) increases if your parents have it. They also found that myopic children spend more time reading for pleasure and score higher in a test of basic reading and language skills. I've sat in meetings of engineers and counted how many wore glasses (plus how many were white and male), and many's the time I've been in meetings where we all were white males wearing glasses or contacts.

A Little Perspective

All the war talk got you down? Well, consider this. Robert Caldwell at Dartmouth University has proposed the death of the universe 20 billion years from now in The Big Rip. The Big Rip is so named because something is causing the universe to expand, and if the effect were to accelerate, it would eventually rip apart not only galaxies, but matter itself. So now cosmologists have three models of the end of the Universe - The Big Rip, the Big Crunch, and the Cold, Dark. Cosmologists are really a happy, jolly bunch of people, aren't they? So I hope this gives you a little perspective on your problems.

Still worried? If the fate of the universe is a little abstratct consider the Earth itself is going to boil away in just five billion years. Happy now?

I'll Cease My Wondering Now

Thursday I wondered if climate changes had caused the collapse of civilizations in the past and hey presto! Konrad A. Hughen, a real scientist, comes forward the next day with the claim that the Mayans were done in by a century long dry trend from roughly 700 AD to 800 AD. And if that isn't enough to make you sit up and take notice, notice the dates. Yep, the Canadian prairie had a distinct dry period starting in 700 AD - the very same time as the Yucatan. Abrupt global climate change, prior to the age of industrialization? Alert Hans Blix!

Thanks to Juan Gato for the heads up (I'd say link, but I linked to a source I liked better).

Another Intestinal Post

In my never ending quest to keep you, my beloved reader, informed on the latest intestinal developments, I link you to another article in Science Blog about intestinal biochemistry. Intrepid researchers right here in River City have discovered just what the heck the molecule MR1 does. Apparently, mucosal-associated invariant t cells (MAIT cells for short and the squeemish) somehow rely on intestinal bacteria and MR1 to keep your gut infection free, a thankless but vital job. The research team has also set its sights higher, to the lungs, to see if MR1 is on the job there, too.

Adult Stem Cells Might Cure Diabetes

The Journal of Clinical Investigation published the results ofan experiment using bone marrow stem cells to produce insulin. These cells, transplanted from a male mouse to female mouse, actually produced insulin and behaved like normal pancreatic beta cells. This was a significant experiment, and shows the possibilities in using adult stem cells.

Who Knew?

Science Blog reports that researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that exposure to men's perspiration can brighten women's moods, reduce tension and increase relaxation, and also has a direct effect on the release of luteinizing hormone, which affects the length and timing of the menstrual cycle. I knew it was powerful stuff, especially when the male volunteers hadn't used deodorant in four weeks, but I wouldn't have predicted that it would make a woman's day. In fact, based on my own experience, I would have predicted the opposite effect.

If you watched Survivor last night, you would have observed this effect in action; when Shawna's tribe was all female, she layed around moaning all day that she was miserable and no one cared (the all female tribe was, if anything, distinctly less nurturing than the all male tribe). As soon as a trio of sweaty men entered camp, armpits uncovered, she perked right up and has been all smiles ever since.

I have to admit, instead of my humdrum existance making bombs fly, I wish I could get paid for devising weird science experiments (let's daub male sweat under womens' noses and see how they react) and then carrying them out. I guess I have experimenter's envy.

It's Not the Stress, It's the Strain

OK, a little engineering humor. Stress is the applied force, and strain is the resulting deformation. So it isn't the stress that gets you, it's your strain that's harmful. In the category that a little is good, a lot is bad, put stress according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health. They claim that stress responses can make people more susceptible to infection, constricted arteries, weakened muscles and thinner bones, as well as a greater tendency to a spare tire around the abdomen due to increased insulin levels. I can say from my own experience when I'm feeling the strain I'm more susceptible to illness, my cholesteral levels go up, and I put on weight. The problem is, I generally don't have any control over the stress - I can only work on feeling less of the strain.

Mother Nature Has A Mind Of Her Own

A Canadian study of drought in the Canadian and Northern US prairie indicates rapid changes in climate in 700 AD. The same researcher's previous work indicated a periodic shift about every 1200 years. They note that similar shifts would pose a challange for society today. Which makes me wonder - sometimes civilizations seem to collapse. Could sudden climate shifts, to much harsher conditions, be the culprit behind some of them? For instance, in 1000 AD there was a flourishing society across the river from St. Louis, cleverly called the Mississippians that up and disappeared. Could it have been the climate? Will we ever know? Anyway, the idea that climate is stable is flat out contradicted by the evidence. It changes, and often abruptly.

Two Shuttle Maps of America

Science Daily reports on a pair of maps made with the Shuttle's Radar. You can even see a huge impact crater in the Yucatan. Way cool.

China Plans For Moon Landing

The China Youth Daily is reporting that China is planning on landing on the moon, first robots and then astronauts. They haven't put an astronaut into space yet, but at least they're making bold (even if they lack innovation) plans. Maybe a good old fashioned space race will spur our program on. Anyway, good luck China.

We are Stardust

Space scientists right here in St. Louis have identified and analyzed stardust through a microscope instead of a telescope. The stardust was collected by NASA by aeroplane and was contained in larger grains of interplanetary dust. Cool.

Backyard Superfund Site?

The Consumer Products Safety Commision is reporting that wooden outdoor play equipment using lumber treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA) increases the risk of bladder and lung cancer in children by somewhere between 2 and 100 in a million. The range is due to the uncertainty about how often children put their hands to their mouths and how long they play on the equipment. So the wooden swingset I built for my daughter nine years ago turns out to be a biohazard site. Great.

Bad News About Intestinal Bacteria

Well, Medical Science has found something bad about normal intestinal bacteria. It seems that endotoxins released by these bacteria during bypass sugery leads to cognitive decline in patients. Just for the record, I was the astute reader who tipped off Robert Musil to this finding. Yes, I enjoy him so much I remember posts of his from last August. It's a gift.

Great Science Blog

Astoundingly, it's called Science Blog. And who says scientistific types aren't creative? I'd say it's loaded with lots of science goodness, but that's so cliched, I can't.

Painful Childbirth

Is there any other kind? Well, this question in the NYT caught my eye: Why do humans, unlike virtually all other mammals, experience so much pain in giving birth? The answer was long and ultimately boiled down to we don't know, but there is an untestable theory. I guess if you run a question and answer column, you can't just say, I don't know.

Exercise - Good For What Ails You

Exercise isn't just good for your muscles and heart - it's good for your brain, too. One thing that's struck me about aging (now that I'm feeling the effects) is how the maintenance requirements just keep increasing. One way to stay young is through exercise. Not only does it keep your muscles from atrophy, it keeps your brain from atrophy. Aerobic exercis is best for your cardiovascular system and your brain. Researchers can measure this both functionally through congitive testing and also physically. People who exercise don't lose as much grey matter (neurons and support cells) or white matter (myelin sheaths) as they age than people who don't exercise. So people, let's get walking out there! We don't want our brains to shrivel up.

More Good News About Intestinal Bacteria

Researchers at Washington University have discovered that intestinal bacteria can cause people (AKA bacterial growth medium) to produce an antibiotic that is specific to invading bacteria. Angiogenins, thought to promote blood vessel growth, apparently are an effective and specific antibiotic (and not only bacteria, but yeast too). Our bodies don't think all bacteria are bad - not only do we need them for certain vital tasks, we take care not kill those off when we try to kill off the ones that attack us.

You might recall the big hoopla around angiogenins awhile back because researchers discovered they could cure cancer in mice with anti-angiogenic compound - they could starve a tumor by taking away its blood supply. Sadly, it hasn't seemed to work in humans. Sadly, I couldn't find a decent link, so you'll just have to rely on my memory.

It's Not My Fault, It's My Genes

Reuters reports that an Italian researcher has linked a gene (charmingly named DD) to abnormal weight gain in men. And it's widespread - about 40% of the population (I'm not clear which population) has it. It's not as big a deal as made out, however when you read that 52 percent of carriers are overweight as compared to 44% of non carriers. That's the problem with reading the last part of an article as opposed to just the headline - the headline is always an attention grabber, staking out the most extreme position, and the real meaning is buried at the end of the article.

All Natural Tanning

When you mix soybean oil with an extract from oat bran, you don't get an all natural fiber laxative, you get an all natural sunscreen with no nasty chemicals, not even to make it,according to the USDA.

Hypertension Risk Determined At Birth?

A German study finds that hypertension is linked to the number of nephrons in your kydneys. Nephrons are the physical structure of capillary and tubes that filter your blood to make urine. The researches examined 20 cadaver kidneys, 10 from people with hypertension, 10 from people without, and discovered that those with hypertension averaged less than half the nephrons of those without. And they couldn't find any evidence that the low count was due to loss of existing nephrons. It would seem that you are born with a certain number of nephrons, and if the number is low, you get hypertension. So get your blood pressure tested -- even if your diet and overall health are perfect, you can still have high blood pressure.

Does God Play Dice?

Well, Einstein was just proven right about the speed of gravity. But so far, his famous saying "God does not play dice" seems to be wrong. Quantum mechanics continues to be probabilistic, not deterministic. In fact, not only does God appear to play dice, he seems to be far more fond of it than beetles. But Gerald 't Hooft is trying to reconcile the two opposite views with a new theory. Right now we have a probabilistic quantum scale giving rise to a deterministic seeming classical scale. Einstein wanted a scale below the quantum, controled by what were known as hidden variables. Well, an experiment in the '80s eliminated hidden variables as tenable science. But 't Hooft thinks he may have found a way around it; the trouble is, this new scale is so small it's far beyond the ability of current technology to measure. Ah, the joys of theoretical physics.

Better Than Sliced Bread

Femtosecond Lasers. Lasers that can vaporize anything in a single pulse, but delicate enough for a woman. Or a man, since I figure I'll get my eyes LASIK'ed by these soon, which in my time frame of reference means the next decade. These lasers have two big benefits: one is they work so fast the material is vaporized before it can transmit any heat into the surrounding material, and two you can actually control the depth in a transparent material at which the vaporization occurs. Mega cool. The coming revolution, if nano-technology and gene manipulation doesn't get there first.

Presidential Advice

The Edge (yeah, never heard of them before, either) asked a bunch of respected scientists and thinkers to pretend The President had asked their advice on the pressing scientific issues of the day, and what to do about them. I read through a bunch, but I found Dennis Dutton's advice to be the best of the bunch:

"I hope your new Science Advisor comes to the job armed with knowledge of the rich history of junk science and false predictions served up to government in the last forty years. The point is not to be cynical about fads and careerism, but wisely to choose where best to support both pure science and science that can give us beneficial technologies. "

OK, it's meta advice, but I think that's better than what a lot of the responses were: variations on "Plastics my boy, plastics." I mean, how can you do any better than:

"Today, it is much easier for scientists to receive grants if they indicate their research might uncover a serious threat or problem—economic, medical, ecological. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of organizations such as Greenpeace. But government itself has played its natural part. After all, as H.L. Mencken once remarked, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." "

High Bad, Low Good

Hormesis. Sounds kind of odd, but it's the idea that high doses of a compound are a poison, low doses are a tonic. Dr. Edward Calabrese advances the theory of Hormesis based on thousands of studies performed on all kinds of organisms. The proposed mechanism is that the low doses stimulates the body and the response is beneficial - for instance, a low dose of radiation causes a small amount of DNA damage which stimulates the body to repair it - if the dose is low enough, the repair exceeds the damage do to the radiation. Too high, and you die. It's hard to build a therapy around, but it does mean we might not have to sweat the small stuff - for instance, there is a point past which cleaning up certain pollutants is actually counter productive, let alone pointless. And the EPA's linear dose models would need to be changed. Still, it's not widely accepted.

This passage caught my eye in the article:

In one session of the conference, veterinarian Dennis Jones, of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta, presented recent findings on low-dose mercury exposure. Jones analyzed data from a study at the Centers for Disease Control that tracked more than 100,000 infants. The infants were given thimerosal, an organic compound of mercury used as a preservative in vaccines. The researchers worried that giving the infants too many vaccines might harm them. But Jones found that limited exposure to mercury actually lessened the children's chances of developing neurological tics, delayed speech, and other pathologies. Jones's analysis is preliminary, so he declined to give concrete numbers. But he called the study "exquisite" and said that it "really amazed" him. Calabrese was not amazed. "In our most recent database search," he said softly into the microphone, "mercury is perhaps the most studied element showing a hormetic effect."

So while there's no scientific evidence so far that mercury in vaccines cause autism, if hormesis is accurate, then there might actually be a benefit to mercury in vaccines. I can see why it's hard to accept.

The Tomato: Good Internally and Externally

OK, we already knew that lycoprenes in tomatos are good for your prostate and your cardiovascular system, but now another compound from the tomato makes a great insect repellent too. It's as good as DEET but lasts longer.

All You Need Is Bacteria

Apparently we do need germs. Without bacteria in the gut, your intestines won't develop properly. A researcher at our own Washington University has discovered that without bacteria colonizing an infant's gut after birth, blood vessels don't properly develop and proliferate in the intestines. Maybe you really do need to eat a pound of dirt to grow up right, as my father-in-law says.

Dogs Dogs Dogs

I'm a dog person. I like them, and they like me. I have never been able to make any of them understand the concept of pointing though, not one. They invariably stare at my hand - they know it must be important, but they can't figure out how. Even my current dog, a Welsh Corgi, which according to the sign at Pass Pets is "highly intellegent" (another sign claimed a different breed was "very intellegent", but we didn't have time to ask the attendent whether highly beat very), can't figure it out. This fine article in Science News claims that not only can dogs do this, but they have an innnate, evolved in ability to do so. In fact, according to the research in the article, dogs are better than chimpanzees in figuring out what people's gestures mean. The test was to put food in one sealed bowl and let them find it. The researchers would then look at or point at the correct bowl and let the animal use this gesture as a way to find it. This makes me feel better, because I talk to my dogs. They don't let on they understand my pointing; maybe there just not letting on they understand my talking either. I don't just praise mind you, but on walks we have whole discussions (pretty much one sided, I have to admit). I ask them what they're smelling, what they're hearing, and a perennial favorite, are you ever going to take a dump on this walk so we can go home?

While I can't get dogs to understand pointing, they've always understood the steps needed to take a walk. Now when it gets dark outside, my dog gets excited, and likes to be close - he doesn't want you slipping out without him noticing. Certain sounds bring the dog running any time -- the sound of the closet door where his leash is kept and the sound of the front door being unlocked. When you put on a coat, he does a little dance of joy. I know just how he feels - no seriously, I do. Freshman year in college, my dorm room overlooked a bike shelter. I was sweet on a particular girl, and in no time at all I could recognize the sound of her bike security chain from all the others. I'd hear the sound of the chain, I'd go look out the window. After I let slip my conditioning to my buddy Carl Drews, good scientist that he is, one afternoon he shook a chain at random and then waited, repeated this proceedure a few times, and then shook her chain. I looked out the window, and instead of seeing her, I saw Carl grinning up at me - giving new meaning to the phrase pulling my chain.

The latest research indicates that dogs come from East Asia. When the first Americans came over the land bridge from Asia, they brought their dogs with them, just like the second Americans when they came over from Europe. And three dog night is the correct expression - it seems that 95% of dogs are descended from three lineages. They don't mention Carolina dogs; it would be interesting to see how they fit in. Since the DNA was mainly collected at dog shows, I doubt they collected any.

Worm Attacks: Invading earthworms threaten rare U.S. fern

That's the title of an article in Science News. Apparently our homeland (yech, what an unamerican word) is under attack by more than al-Qaida. I had no idea until I read the article, but America north of line between Massachusetts to Iowa has no native earthworms (no word on what happens west of there). When I read that, it reminded me of when I went off to school in California and discovered they had no lightning bugs. How can you not have worms? How can you not have lightning bugs? Anyway, some rare fern that requires a lot of leaf litter is being threatened by a particular European earthworm that does an otherwise admirable job of recycling leaf litter. I guess as an exotic European colonist myself, I can't complain too loudly about the worms. What did the early bird eat in Minnesota before the European worms showed up?

The Science of Humor

How do neuroscientists study the brain's response to humor in a natural setting? They have monitor the brain activity of subjects while watching Seinfeld. They use the laugh track to synch up the jokes with the brain's response. Then to evaluate the effect of the laugh track, they have the subjects watch the Simpsons since it has no laugh track. The laugh track had no effect on the brain's response (they didn't address whether it makes a show funnier).

They discovered that humor is a two step process in the brain - first regions associated with resolving ambiguities (the posterior temporal cortex and inferior frontal cortex) are active, and then within seconds regions associated with emotion and memory are active (insula and amygdala). In other words, scientists have conclusively proven that you have to get the joke before you think it's funny. Unless, of course, it contains the word duck.

Titan Has Clouds

Astronomers in Hawaii have spotted clouds on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Cool.

Smallpox Vaccine: Good News and Bad News

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports good news and bad news about the results of a pilot study on the Smallpox vaccine carried out right here at St. Louis University. The good news is that it would appear diluted vaccine does confer an immune response in people who were vaccinated previously (the general public hasn't been vaccinated since 1972 in the US). Since there are only 15 million vaccine doses and more than 280 million Americans, that's good news. Some scientists worried that the old vaccination would confer enough of a response to require an even larger dose of the vaccine, let alone not allow a smaller dose to work. The bad news is that the old vaccination doesn't appear to provide an immune response after more than 30 years - 10 years is apparently the accepted length of time, so for all of us who were once routinely innoculated and have that weird looking scar to prove it, we have no increased immunity to smallpox. A larger study is now being started to determine just how diluted the vaccine should be. If you're worried and were once vaccinated, then call the Center for Vaccine Development at 314-977-6333 and see if you can sign up - although I warn you that people do have adverse repsonses to the vaccine (beyond the two weeks of a pus filled sore at the vaccination site).